Cell phones and places: The use of mobile technologies in Brazil

Mobile phones are increasingly pervasive technologies in contemporary society. Worldwide cell phones have largely surpassed the number of PCs,1 and appear to be surpassing the popularity of TV sets (Rice & Katz, 2003, p. 598). However, it is not possible to define a monolithic global cell phone culture. The mobile interface is used significantly differently in distinct parts of the world, depending on cultural, social, and economic local specificities. Even within specific countries and regions, there are substantial differences in the use of technology as a result of many factors, including age, culture, socioeconomic distribution, and instruction level. The use we make of technology does not depend solely on the technology per se, but is intrinsically connected to how the technology is culturally embedded in social practices. This paper is an early exploration of the reasons for the exponential growth and social uses of mobile technologies in Brazil, a developing country, with wideranging social and economic diversity. This study aims at contextualizing three research questions to the Brazilian situation: (1) How do low income communities appropriate technology in unusual ways based on price policies and technology availability? (2) To what degree does the increasingly pervasiveness of cell phones transform them into social collective technologies? (3) How the initial idea of the digital divide should be redefined when cell phones replace not only landlines, but also personal computers? With the goal of answering the above-mentioned questions, this article is structured in two main parts. The first two questions are addressed with a comparison between low income2 and high income population3 use of cell phones in Brazil. It looks at how cell phone usage is shaped by the availability of technology, focusing on two factors that promoted cell phone growth in the country: poor landline infrastructure and the emergence of pre-paid phones. It also gives an overview of the mobile services available in the country for the