How Prepaid Billing in Italy Helped Shape the Global Diffusion of Mobile Phones.

Why was Italy the first country to introduce prepaid mobile phone billing services in 1996? What was the key to its success that led seventy-five telecommunications operators to introduce prepaid billing by 1998 and accelerated the mass adoption of mobile phones around the world? This article examines why prepaid was successful in light of national policies and sociocultural shifts. Along with SMS, handhelds, GSM, and the digitization of mobile communications, prepaid billing played a role in the rapid and immense spread of the mobile phone worldwide. As an innovative means of paying for mobile phone usage, prepaid represented a departure from operators' previous mobile phone payment methods. The article argues that by overlooking the contribution of this form of payment, telephone historians, the media, and business scholars have ignored this important driver of the success of mobile phones.

The advanced use of mobile phones in five European countries.

The paper explores the advanced users of mobile phones in Italy, France, Germany, Spain and the UK (EU5 countries) and aims to clarify the social meaning of advanced use. The mobile phone is seen as a strategic tool of social labour, whose capabilities are exploited to a different extent in the five studied countries. The analysis is based on a cross-national survey data collected in 2009 (N = 7,255). First, the results show that there are substantial differences in the advanced use of mobile phone and its predictors in Europe. Generally, only about one third of the studied mobile features are exploited. British and French people are the most advanced users, followed by German, Spanish and Italians. While Italians have stuck to early developed mobile phone features, Britons especially have continued to adopt the newer properties of the mobile phone. Second, the article shows that owing to the extensive under-utilization of its features, the mobile phone as a tool of social labour is efficiently exploited by only a small number of people. They, however, constitute technological vanguards that make use of the diverse features in different countries. This limited use of advanced features results in the new patterns of social stratification.

What happened to body-to-body sociability?

This article aims to investigate how the body-to-body forms of sociability evolved from 1996 to 2009 simultaneously with the proliferation of ICTs in Europe and why this happened. The article also aims to find out how the socio-demographic profile of Europeans practising these forms developed in the same period of time. The analysis is based on two surveys carried out in Italy, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain in 1996 (N=6609) and 2009 (N=7255). Results show that although the internal diffusion and frequency of the forms of communicative sociability changed, on the whole the amount of sociability has increased so slightly that it would be more appropriate to speak about real stability over the time. Secondly, results reveal that the possession of mobile phones and personal computers in 1996, and respectively the Internet in 2009, was especially associated with the increase in sociability. Lastly, the socio-demographic profile of the Europeans practising these forms of sociability changed between 1996 and 2009, although less than one might have expected.