Technological and Economic Changes Affecting Communications
La telefonía móvil introdujo la ubicuidad comunicativa y desplazó el control de la comunicación desde las infraestructuras hacia los usuarios, redefiniendo prácticas sociales y económicas.
In general—and mobile communications in particular—for the purposes at hand the focus is on mobility as the basic factor that largely explains the unprecedented success of the mobile phone. As noted earlier, the mobile phone as a technology added nothing fundamentally new, since all of its applications were already available on the market. What proved decisive was the integrated combination of those applications and the real possibility of accessing them whenever—and above all wherever—the user wished. Communicative ubiquity is the core potential of mobile phones: users now determine where communication takes place, rather than the strategic plans of fixed-network owners, the traditional framework for interpersonal communication. This shift is crucial to understanding the rapid popularization of mobiles during the decade, even in contexts with income levels well below those of countries considered a priori wealthier. The major paradox of mobile expansion in developing countries is that individual access has outpaced infrastructure development—unlike the European experience—an imbalance that inevitably affects service quality. Even so, this threat does not overshadow the fact that, for many countries, especially in Africa, the mobile phone represents the first and only viable communication option, enabling the gradual integration of population segments previously excluded, such as rural communities and displaced persons (Townsend, Pande, Gorbis, 2007). Thus, the commercialization of mobile phones in the mid-1990s did not introduce a novel application so much as reveal a latent and unmet demand for mobility that the industry itself had not anticipated.
Mobility is a multidimensional factor at the very heart of (post)modern societies, affecting both private and public spheres, including economic processes. It encompasses commuters who travel daily between urban peripheries and business centers in emerging megalopolises and have found mobile phones to be an ideal means of communication that does not slow their movement. It also includes the exponential increase in national and international travel—driven largely by lower airfares, especially in more developed regions—which has created a new critical mass of users demanding accessible, instantaneous communications without the cost of roaming. Financial globalization, with the growth of offshore processes, has extended communication and management needs for a growing number of professionals from advanced economies into emerging regions, such as the BRICS. The culture of virtuality generated by the internet has expanded individuals’ spheres of influence beyond their immediate geography, producing new social networks of planetary scale based on shared interests. These networks themselves act as potential drivers of greater mobility. Added to this is the intensification of individual activity: rising competitive pressure in new labor environments, along with a pervasive sense of emptiness in modern life, fuels a constant need to fill available time—to avoid wasting it. In this context, mobile devices are uniquely capable of providing access to services anywhere, according to a 24/7 logic.
Finally, there is speed. The desire “to go for everything”—to maximize personal achievements per unit of time—heightens the need to move faster, partly due to a culture of hedonism but also, as Oliveto aptly observes, because of the paradoxical awareness that we are racing against the clock in a life that has never been so long (Oliveto, 2007). Paradoxically, the industry’s initial underestimation—shared by many governments and institutions—of the mobile phone’s true usefulness in everyday life transformed an early weakness into its greatest strength. Users themselves shaped terminals and cellular networks by prioritizing certain services over others. Consequently, mobile phones can be regarded as the first mass-use technology that is genuinely adaptive among new ICTs, a view shared by Manuel Castells, who adds that people do not merely adapt the mobile phone but “adopt and modify it according to their needs, values, and interests” (Castells, 2006). This Copernican shift—where users and consumers, for the first time, tell industry what products are for—should not be seen as a market anomaly or dysfunction. Rather, it signals the emergence of a demand-driven economy that now dominates the most dynamic sectors of the global economy.
