![]() In short, these powerful handheld computing tools have extended communication capabilities and convenience, thereby articulating new socialities in the context of changing economic realities. This extension into data applications, multimedia, and entertainment has transformed the character of the portable phone and fashioned new material relations between and across cultural, symbolic, social-interactional, political, and economic domains. As mobile-broadband services bypass those of fixed-line grids, web-enabled phones (“smart phones”) are increasingly used not only to communicate by voice but also to text messages, share information, post updates, transmit image, video, and sound files, specify geographical locations, connect to the Internet, play games, and interact on social networking sites. ![]() 2 This development affords users the world over with enhanced means for social, economic and political interaction proffering, on the one hand, new modalities of individuality and autonomy and, on the other, of interactivity, collaboration, and connectivity. ![]() The mass adoption of mobile communication devices reflects a growth rate unprecedented in the history of technologies-from a few hundred million to over four billion people in the first decade of the 21st century.
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