The Dark Side of Mobile Communication
Monday 23 November 2009 16:00 - 17:30
- Naomi Baron, Professor of Linguistics, American University, Washington, DC
Location: Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 1 St Giles Oxford OX1 3JS. If you would like to attend please email your name and affiliation, if any, to: events@oii.ox.ac.uk
Mobile phones have revolutionized contemporary human communication. Users, manufacturers, and telecommunications companies are quick to extol such virtues of the technology as convenient interpersonal connectivity, entertainment during dead time, or a sense of personal security. Yet there is also a darker side to mobiles: user complaints about the devices themselves and, more importantly, about the disadvantages of always being reachable.
Drawing upon her cross-cultural research on mobile phones, Naomi Baron discusses conflicting attitudes university students have towards their mobile devices, and then examines the individual and social implications of these conflicts.
About the Speaker
Naomi S. Baron is Professor of Linguistics at American University in Washington, DC. A former Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Fellow, she earned a BA in English at Brandeis and a PhD in Linguistics at Stanford. Professor Baron is the author of seven books, including Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It's Heading (Routledge, 2000) and Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World (Oxford, 2008). Always On was joint winner of the 2008 Duke of Edinburgh English-Speaking Union Book Award. She has done research on IM, blogs, social networking, and multitasking. Presently she is completing a cross-cultural study of mobile phone use by university students in Sweden, the US, Italy, Japan, and Korea.
