Social meaning of mobile phone within the context of the social construction of technology approach

The study is theoretically based on the social construction of technology approach and presents the social meaning of mobile phone within the context of daily life practices. In the study the semi-structured interviews were conducted with 28 participants who had different demographic characteristics and different subjective daily life reality. Study findings were revealed with an inductive analysis. The conclusions of the study are: In Turkey mobile phone used to be adopted as a communication medium and a symbol of status. Nowadays in the same society, because of its multimedia content, mobile phone is adopted with different social meanings such as; a communication and a socializing medium, a medium of accelerating the operations management in both business and private life, a gaining profit medium, a medium of efficiently arranging and managing daily life. Besides its multimedia content, factors that affect the adoption of mobile phone with different social meanings in the same society relies on individuals' different personal characteristics, perceptions and attitudes, subjective daily life reality, knowledge and skills concerning mobile phones. In Turkey the human agency has been used to overcome the structural constraint of mobile phone since its adoption, and for that the communication technologies knowledge and skills of individuals have been used. In this sense, it can be stated that forcing/changing the structural constraint of a communication technology is related not only with a human agency, but also with having a certain level of knowledge and skills concerning communication technologies.