Retraditionalizing the Mobile

This article, based on ethnographic research in Seoul, South Korea, proposes a `peripheral' and local perspective on teenage mobile phone users and sociality. The teenage users show that the mobile phone, which has often been represented as an example of global imagination technologies, is here appropriated in localized ways in which the traditional form of sociality, Cheong, is rearticulated. After reviewing the recent literature on young people's identity formation in relation to globalization, the article explores the way in which the mobile phone is appropriated as a means of extending traditional sociality between peers and family members. The study suggests that there is no clear-cut evidence that young people have become disembedded from local sociality; rather, they are reimagining the local through global imagination technology.