Mobile communication has an increasing impact on people's lives and society. Ubiquitous media influence the way users relate to their surroundings, and data services like text and pictures lead to a culture shaped by thumbs. Representing several years of research into the social and cultural effects of mobile phone use, this volume assembles fascinating approaches and new insights of leading scientists and practitioners. It contains the results of a first international survey on the social consequences of mobile phones and provides a comprehensive inventory of today's issues and an outlook in mobile media, society, and their future study. Peter Glotz is Emeritus Professor of Media and Society, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Stefan Bertschi is a researcher at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.

Surveying a range of topics, this lively and informative survey provides an up-to-date, thematic global history of popular culture focusing on the period since the end of the Second World War.

95 percent of Americans own some kind of cell phone. It has become a tool that people feel lost without when forgotten at home or elsewhere. This volume comprehensively covers the origins and evolution of cell phone technology. Readers will consider its impact on society and future uses.

If the social does not exist as a special domain but, in Bruno Latour’s words, as ‘a peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling’, what implications does this have for how ‘the cultural’ might best be conceived? What new ways of thinking the relations between culture, the economy and the social might be developed by pursuing such lines of inquiry? And what are the implications for the relations between culture and politics? Contributors draw on a range of theoretical perspectives, including those associated with Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Law and Haraway, in order to focus on the roles of different forms of expertise and knowledge in producing cultural assemblages. What expertise is necessary to produce indigenous citizens? How does craniometry assemble the head? What kinds of knowledge were required to create markets for life insurance? These and other questions are pursued in this collection through a challenging array of papers concerned with cultural assemblages as diverse as brands and populations, bottled water and mobile television.

Providing the first comprehensive, accessible, and international introduction to cell phone culture and theory, this book is and clear and sophisticated overview of mobile telecommunications, putting the technology in historical and technical context. Interdisciplinary in its conceptual framework, Cell Phone Culture draws on a wide range of nationa

What does it mean to 'chew the fat'? Why do we put things in 'apple-pie order'? And what on earth is a 'hat trick'? Readers will learn all this and more in this fun and engaging new addition to the Complete Idiot's Guide® series, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Weird Word Origins. This humorous book provides entertaining insight on the often metaphorical, always taken-for-granted phrases and expressions used every day. In it, language expert Paul McFedries takes readers through the sometimes surprising, always amusing world of weird words and expressions, and the fascinating stories that surround them. Presented in a fun, easy-to-read style, this book takes readers on a journey through the bizarre and eccentric origins that make up our everyday speech.