How does culture affect the use of mobile technology?

First of all, we need to distinguish the meaning of culture, either as a derived custom, a nation-specific mindset, or a lifestyle trend.

Between the 1980s and the 2000s, the mobile phone has gone from being an expensive item used by the business elite to a pervasive, personal communications tool for the general population. In many countries, mobile phones outnumber land-line phones; in the US, half of all children have mobile phones. In many young adults' households it has supplanted the land-line phone. Mobile phone usage is banned in some countries, such as North Korea and restricted in some other countries such as Burma.

Given the high levels of societal mobile phone service penetration, it is a key means for people to communicate with each other. The SMS feature spawned the "texting" sub-culture amongst younger users. In December 1993, the first person-to-person SMS text message was transmitted in Finland. Currently, texting is the most widely-used data service; 1.8 billion users generated $80 billion of revenue in 2006. Many phones offer Instant Messenger services for simple, easy texting. Mobile phones have Internet service (e.g. NTT DoCoMo's i-mode), offering text messaging via e-mail in Japan, South Korea, China, and India. In Europe, 30–40 per cent of internet access is via mobile phone. Most mobile internet access is much different from computer access, featuring alerts, weather data, e-mail, search engines, instant messages, and game and music downloading; most mobile internet access is hurried and short.

The mobile phone can be a fashion totem custom-decorated to reflect the owner's personality. This aspect of the mobile telephony business is, in itself, an industry, e.g. ringtone sales amounted to $3.5 billion in 2005.

Mobile phone use can be an important matter of social discourtesy: phones ringing during funerals or weddings; in toilets, cinemas and theaters. Some book shops, libraries, bathrooms, cinemas, doctors' offices and places of religious worship prohibiting their use, so that other patrons will not be disturbed by conversations. Some facilities install signal-jamming equipment to prevent their use, although in many countries, including the US, such equipment is illegal. Some new auditoriums have installed wire mesh in the walls to make a Faraday cage, which prevents signal penetration without violating signal jamming laws.

Trains, particularly those involving long-distance services, often offer a "quiet carriage" where phone use is prohibited, much like the designated non-smoking carriage of the past. In the UK however many users tend to ignore this as it is rarely enforced, especially if the other carriages are crowded and they have no choice but to go in the "quiet carriage". In Japan, it is generally considered impolite to talk using a phone on any train -- texting is generally the mode of mobile communication. Mobile phone usage on local public transport is also increasingly seen as a nuisance; the city of Graz, for instance, has mandated a total ban of mobile phones on its tram and bus network in 2008 (though texting is still allowed). Mobile phone use on aircraft is also prohibited and many airlines claim in their in-plane announcements that this prohibition is due to possible interference with aircraft radio communications. Shut-off mobile phones do not interfere with aircraft avionics; the concern is partially based on the crash of Crossair Flight 498.

In the Finnish town of Savonlinna, every year the peculiar sport of "Mobile Phone Throwing" is taking place, where participants blissfully throw original devices. In Japan, there is a popular trend to use the mobile phone handset to read information from special barcodes. The current technology is based on something called 'QR codes' which are a form of 2D barcode that is written out in a square shape instead of a bar shape. The phone handset can scan the barcode using its camera or other input, decode the information, and then take actions based on the type of content. The most popular usage of these QR codes is in advertising. All over Japan there are posters with the codes on and they are found extensively in magazines and even on some people’s business cards. The QR code usually has links to a web site address or email address that the phone can access, or it might contain address and telephone numbers.

===Sources:===
1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone
2)"Rise in executions for mobile use", ITV News, June 15, 2007
3)PC World - Cell Phone Fashion Show, http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,125476-page,1/article.html
4)Gundersen, Edna, "Mastertones ring up profits", USA Today, 11/29/2006
5)http://www.scandinavica.com/culture/sports/phonethrowing.htm
6)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_cell_phone_culture

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