Lectura Académica Estratégica 14

Inglés - Nivel Medio 2020

TEXT 2
ANTICIPATE

Work in small groups and then be ready to share your answers with the whole class:

1. Check paratext and complete the chart below:

Title TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF THE MOBILE PHONE

Source Publicación en línea
Author Jim McGuigan
Date of Publication Abril 2005
Length of whole article 12 páginas
Field of Study interdisciplinar entre el campo Sociológico y tecnologico

2. Read lines 1 - 8. What kind of information does this section present?

3. How is this excerpt organized? From general to specific or vice versa? Support your
answer.
4. What do you know about the event described in these lines? You might want to google
it.
5. Read the last two sentences. Circle key words or phrases. What section of the article are
you asked to read? How do you know? What linguistic exponents helped you decide?
6. Write a general reading hypothesis. Share it with your companions.
7. Scan the whole text now to circle key words and phrases that interrelate with the
information we have just picked up.
8. Write a more specific reading hypothesis.
9. Now, read the whole text.

VERIFICATION
Work in small groups. Then, be ready to share your answers with the whole class.
1. Conceptualize the paragraphs. Remember concepts should be written in noun phrases.
2. Identify subjective discourse signs. Why is it important to have them into account?
3. What’s the function of the following linking devices? Paraphrase the concepts they join
a) Yet (line 12 and 18)
b) such as (line 31)
4. What is the Spanish equivalent for aim to and issues (l.50)?
5. How does the author illustrate the macro and micro level he refers to in the last
sentence?
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Inglés - Nivel Medio 2020

INTERNALIZATION
1. Write the main idea in one well-written sentence.
2. Share your production with your companions.
3. Compare and contrast what you have written. Are they similar? different? if so, how?
4. Would you change your main idea, now?
5. You should finally submit your main idea for correction via the course virtual classroom.

ANALYSING the EXCERPT from the READER'S POINT of VIEW

1. Refer to the questions we used to analyze text organization from the reader's point of
view on p. 13.
2. What kind of text organization does this excerpt present?
3. Where do you find the most important information?
4. Analyze the supporting material in this excerpt. What functions does it have?

OVER TO YOU
Look at the picture below. How does it relate to the title of the text we have just read?
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Inglés - Nivel Medio 2020

An Interdisciplinary Journal on Humans in ICT Environments

ISSN: 1795-6889

www.humantechnology.jyu.fi Volume 1 (1), April 2005, 45-57

TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF THE MOBILE PHONE

Jim McGuigan
Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, UK

1 To begin, I would like you to consider this quotation from Howard Rheingold’s
celebration of the cooperative properties of person-to-person wireless communications,
Smart Mobs:

On January 20, 2001, President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines became the first
head of state in history to lose power to a smart mob. More than 1 million Manila
residents, mobilized and coordinated by waves of text messages, assembled at the
site of the 1986 “People Power” peaceful demonstrations that had toppled the
Marcos regime. (Rheingold, 2002, p. 157)

10 Do you notice anything odd about that statement? Rheingold is illustrating the value
of mobile telephony in organizing popular protest with reference to the overthrow of Estrada
in 2001. Yet he underlines this point by reference to a much earlier and comparable event in
1986 when, presumably, mobile phones had not played a significant role in mobilizing the
masses.

That’s one example; here’s another. My 18-year-old daughter and my 21-year-old

son find social life virtually inconceivable without a mobile phone. Maintaining a friendship
network and arranging meetings would be just too much hassle without the mobile. Yet,
when I was 18 or 21, I had friends too and, somehow, I managed to meet up with them.
20
I make these observations merely to reflect upon how a recent luxury has become a
current necessity and to register a note of skepticism concerning the allegedly
transformational capacities of newer information and communication technologies.
Commercial hype and utopian anarchism, to my mind, mystify rather than illuminate the
significance of the mobile phone. Which is not to say it is insignificant. The mobile phone is
an immensely significant social and cultural phenomenon.
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At the beginning of his book, Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone,
30 Jon Agar (2003) smashes up his mobile phone to scrutinize what it contains. The raw materials
in its many components are culled from around the world, such as nickel for the battery from
Chile, microprocessors and circuitry from the USA. Petroleum for the plastic casing, molded,
say, in Taiwan, and for the LCD (liquid crystal display) comes from somewhere like the Persian
Gulf, the North Sea, Russia or Texas. The rare metal tantalum, essential for capacitors that
store electrical charges, comes, most likely, from the aboriginal lands of Western Australia or
the Democratic Republic of Congo. During the 1990s the price of tantalum per pound shot up
from US$30 to $300. Columbite-tantalite (coltan), mined in the North East of Congo, is a
source of civil war over mineral rights and the revenue from its mining continues to fund
hostilities there. This process is one way of defamilarizing what has become a very familiar
40 object over the past few years.

The mobile phone is not reducible only to a material object, a commodity circulating
in the global economy of transnational operations, of course; it is also a means of
communication with considerable social and cultural significance. For some users, the sign
value of this object might actually exceed its use value, functioning as a magical fetish, which
is certainly the message of much advertising. The mobile is a symbol in itself, an obscure
object of desire and a sign of the times. Early efforts have been made to map out a general
sociology of the mobile phone (Geser, 2003; Katz &Aakhus, 2002). This paper has no such
comprehensive ambition. The following notes towards a possible sociology of the mobile
50 phone aim to identify key issues in theory and methodology. It is important to situate the
mobile phone in relation to the sociology of change, the macro level, and everyday sociality,
the micro level.

© 2005 Jim McGuigan and the AgoraCenter, University of Jyväskylä

URN:NBN:fi:jyu-2005125

© 2020. Otero, A.M.A. Guía Texto 2: Towards a sociology of the mobile phone - Lectura Académica
Estratégica - Ingles Nivel Medio - Cátedra de Inglés -Departamento de lenguas Modernas - Facultad de
Filosofía y Letras - UBA

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