Chapter 2: Mobile Subcultures

Mobile and personal communication devices, systems and technologies are increasingly important in society, providing users with genuinely “any-time, anyplace” sources of contact, information, and entertainment, and access to resources and to each other. The exponential rise in the use of these devices in western industrialized nations—and everywhere else— raises questions about their impact on learners, teachers, communities, and society in general. This chapter offers an evaluation of this impact by exploring their impact on ideas of culture, community, discourse, identity, and their relationships to education, and tries to reconcile one perception that there now exist discrete mobile subcultures with another perception that all cultures are somehow transformed by mobility.