‘It’s changed my life’: iPhone as technological artefact

This chapter is positioned in the new literacy studies (Street 1984, 1995) and it views literacies as multiple and changing social practices and identities around a diversity of textual forms. From this vantage point, it is interested in developing a sociomaterial understanding of the ways in which mobile phones are impacting on the ways in which young people conceptualise their engagements with the everyday and develop and deploy a range of identity and textual practices. It builds an object ethnography (Carrington and Dowdall 2013; Fowles 2006) in relation to a technological artefact – an iPhone – owned and used by Roxie, a sixteen-year-old Anglo-European adolescent living in a large European city, and draws from Ihde (1990, 1993, 2009) and Verbeek’s (2005, 2006b) work around a postphenomenology of technology to sketch the broader implications of Roxie’s close involvement with her iPhone. Roxie was interviewed as part of a larger study of young people from twelve to nineteen years of age and their phone use; however, the chapter argues that her particular engagement with her iPhone draws attention to interesting issues related to discourses of identity, technology and space and, as a corollary, the contexts in which young people develop a range of literate practices.