From Teenage Life to Victorian Morals and Back: technological change and teenage life’

We are often told that mobiles, and that mobile texting in particular, has changed the lives of teenagers (Ling 2004; Nyiri 2003). One can easily imagine how, in the past, teenagers would wonder what their friends were up to, and would have to exercise their minds to figure this out: now, in contrast, they can call or text them. Thus the walls of teenage experience have been altered; what was once impossible is now achieved at the cost of only a few pence (for a review, see Harper et al. forthcoming). But is this change so great? One should remind oneself also that what teenagers find when they make these calls or texts to their friends is not something that will surprise us or them: one imagines that they discover that their friends are, like themselves, lurking in their bedrooms, sulking about too much homework and yearning to be elsewhere. And this indolence, this teenager ennui, one would readily agree, is hardly something new nor, alas, something that will vanish in the ‘mobile age’ (see Katz & Aakhus 2002; Brown et al. 2002; Harper 2003).