The Mobile Phone between Orality and Writing
This paper looks into the use of mobile telephones, and, in particular, into the different strategies and logic of use of orality and writing, of calls and SMS messages by Italian adolescents. It is a qualitative research project, based on thirty non structured interviews supplied to a convenience sample of adolescents (15 males and 15 females). These interviews were gathered in Italy in 2000, period in which SMS exploded inside mobile communication. The SMS explosion especially concerned teenagers in Italy, as in many European countries. The aim of this research is to try to understand: the raisons for what teenagers decide to talk in the mobile phone or to write messages; when and in which situations they prefer talk or write; what are the emotions, the feelings, the reactions that a mobile call causes for them in comparison with those caused by a written message; to which extent they care of the other people, of the context in which they are when they use the mobile phone; what are the themes, the arguments that they develop in a mobile call and what in a SMS; the meaning of this kind of communication mobile (talked and written) in their social life. The results of this research help us not only to enlighten the patterns of use of the mobile phone on the behalf of adolescents, but helps also to understand two other important elements. It helps us to understand, first of all, what is happening in the world of culture; secondly, what is happening in the everyday life of adolescents. In the culture world the territories of orality and writing are completely restructuring, in the sense that in this case, for example, writing has penetrated in the territory of the telephone mobile, the oral instrument par excellence. In many cases and occasions adolescents, who have recently been refractory to writing, prefer to write instead to talk. Perhaps very short messages, but written. The discovery of the charm of writing assumes new meanings in the hands of adolescents. In the everyday life of adolescents several changes have transformed the needs and so the attitudes and behaviors of this class of age. For example, the fact that a high percentage of them have not brothers or sisters has left a communicative emptiness. Often, the mobile phone use serves to fill this emptiness.