Mobile Phone, “Domestic Alien” and Sociation: A Sociological Analysis of the Co-construction of Society and Technology

How does a technological device transcend its usual nature of importance? Why does a mere piece of technology appear to (re)define its users, which sometimes seem equivalent to "life"? This paper examines how disadvantaged youth with little or no formal educational qualification use the phone in their everyday life in Bangladesh. Undereducated youth use the voice-to-text option (V2T) to search the internet. It made possible two extraordinary things: First, breaking the barrier between formal written worlds and the colloquial world, and second, bridging the world of known-local people residing in the physically accessible space, on the one hand, and the global-virtual world, on the other. This paper argues that among the studied disadvantaged people, the little digital machine known as a mobile phone is not merely a device that they find themselves in awe with; "the little phone" often appears to be equivalent to life, the lack of which makes mobile users immobile, hapless, and "lifeless." Known unknowns reign in the world where mobile phones connect people across time, space, nationality, and identity. In the presence of the digital little machine, the familiar world re-appears in unfamiliar ways. The inability to secure access to a mobile phone forces people to lose their vital connection. Without the phone, they suffer from triple death. Mobile is life! I argue that society is technology made invisible, which is an extension of Latour's (1990) famous observation: “Technology is society made durable.”