Mobile Communication and Society

Today I've received the book I was looking from some months ago. It's a research essay on, as the title of this post says, Mobiles and Society. Linked with this topic there is an article I've been suggested to read in La Vanguardia and that is on Web 2.0, the recurrent topic of the last 4 or 5 years in the ICT industry. In a former post I babbled on the possibility for the Mobile Technology to converge (another buzz word) in a Mobile 2.0 paradigm. In that post I put the SMS technology as an incipient one seeming the possibilities of social participation and content generation of the users. A recent news talked about that the SMS technology was 8000% (1500? per MB!) more expensive that its correspondent over UMTS... and it continues to be used. Some factors influence this use. Of course, the fact that ALL the mobile terminals in the world that use the GSM technology implement this feature and the easy use in any terminal have promoted this. But even in the communication between people that know each other and have cheaper alternatives like IM, email and others, continue to use this 7bit alphabet, text based mean of communication. But what I see even more amazing is that mobile provider still see the SMS service as a value added one... strange humans, I say.