Heterotextuality and Digital Foreplay

The now ubiquitous cell phone as digital media and communication technology invites a proliferation of uses and meanings. The ways in which young people have taken up cell phones in general and text messaging in particular seems to create cyborgian subjectivities in a refashioned mobile social network. This resulting digital-social network constructs a space in which young people perform identities that, while conventionally gendered in some ways, also show signs of increasing communicative competence, particularly in potentially romantic relationships. Text messaging seems to become a nonthreatening space where young people check each other out without risking as much shame or embarrassment as may occur in face-to-face encounters. By focusing on everyday human-machine entanglements using actor-network theory as a framework, it is evident that gender is produced by technological devices as well as by discourses and human forms of meaning making, thus confirming the absence of either essentialised gender or essentialised understandings of technology. Gender is performed through a proliferating network within which humans, machines and other actors are entangled. Keywords: gendercell phonestext messagingactor-network theorydatingteenagers Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank all of the young people who agreed to be part of the focus groups, Gabrielle Alchin and Natasha Vine for research assistance, and Charlie Borg for facilitating access to one of the schools. Notes 1. Recent media articles have pointed out how New Zealand has the highest mobile charges in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD; Eaton 2007 Eaton, Dan (2007) 'NZ phone fees near highest, says Commerce Commission', The Press, 17 April, [Online] Available at: http://www.stuff.co.nz/4028373a6427.html (24 April 2007) [Google Scholar]). 2. It seems from our research that girls are less likely than boys to not have their cell phones with them or to switch them off. Some boys described abandoning texting when they were on holiday so they could get on with outdoor pursuits. 3. For examples of feminist objections to ANT, see Leigh Star (1991 Leigh Star, Susan. 1991. "Power, technology and the phenomenology of conventions: on being allergic to onions". In A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, Edited by: Law, John. 26–56. London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]) and Cockburn (1992 Cockburn, Cynthia. 1992. "The circuit of technology: gender, identity and power". In Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, Edited by: Silverstone, Roger and Hirsch, Eric. 32–47. London & New York: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 4. That is not to say that text messaging is not equally important for young gay people, but simply that none of our focus group participants identified as openly gay.