Introduction

In France the mobile phone, launched in 1987, developed slowly at first, before suddenly taking off in 1997. Since then its annual growth rate has been 120%, with the number of subscribers rising to 14 million in 2000, a little under 30% of the population. This success needs to be analyzed not only in light of the exceptional speed of diffusion but also because of the mass phenomenon (quantitative threshold) it expresses. For once, sociologists of technology are not asking the question: “What is curbing the adoption and use of the tool?” On the contrary, they are wondering: “What are the limits of growth?” of a tool that no one doubts, least of all non-subscribers, is destined for universal ownership. In many surveys non-subscribers mention a prevailing pressure to acquire a tool that they do not need but that they will eventually purchase.

Excluding the corded telephone and, to a lesser extent, television, no other medium has had the same potential for universal use. Under pressure from other industrialized countries, the telephone became ubiquitous in France only in the 1970s, nearly a century after its invention. Unlike the corded phone and television, the mobile phone is neither revolutionary nor the harbinger of a new technological capacity. It merely reproduces existing properties of the telephone but shifts them onto new ground and into previously inaccessible situations.