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symbolic value whose consumption in domestic
spaces has a bearing on the present and future
of those technologies. This chapter avoids the
'domestication' label, instead viewing the broader
socio-cultural system as a more significant param-
eter to account particularly for mobile telephony.
In support of this view there are national studies
looking at the role and value of national values
(or cultures) in the reception and adoption of mo-
bile phones and seeking to explain certain daily
practices with this ICT (see, for instance, Part I
of Katz and Aakhus, 2008). Such studies reach
diverse conclusions concerning the role of social
or national in the adoption of mobile telephony
and reject any rigid definitions of culture and its
scope, thus being in line with the approach this
chapter takes in order to answer the question:
does mobile telephony differ from other ICTs such
as the Internet in the particular socio-cultural
context of Greece?
survey concluded that Greece was last in Internet
usage in the EU-25 with a mere 24% of the popu-
lation using the Internet in 2005 (from 15% in
2003/2004) (European Commission, 2006, p. 14).
The same data illustrated that mobile telephony
in Greece is more widely used than the Internet,
even among the younger groups of the population,
with 30% of children owning a mobile phone and
26% using the Internet in 2005 (36% and 50%,
respectively, in the EU-25) (European Commis-
sion, 2006, p. 19). One year later, in 2006, the EB
E-Communications Household survey (European
Commission, 2007, p. 12) found that only 16%
of households in Greece had a fixed phone line
but not mobile telephone access, a lower figure
than the respective percentages in many other
counties with higher Internet access rates, such
as Germany and France. In addition, according
to the 2007 EB E-Communications Household
survey (European Commission, 2008, p. 11), the
percentage of households in Greece with no mobile
access was even lower in 2007 (14%), while a
higher percentage of households in Greece (86%)
than in the average EU member state (83%) had
at least one mobile telephone access (European
Commission, 2008, p. 28). On the other hand, 41%
of Greek households had a computer and 19%
had Internet access in 2007, positioning Greece
below the EU-27 (57% and 42%, respectively)
(European Commission, 2008, p. 49 & 54). More
recently, the national survey of the Observatory
for the Greek information society (2009) found
that even if a higher percentage of Greek house-
holds had access to the Internet (39.4%) in 2008
than in previous years, the majority of the Greek
population were still offline. In contrast to the
Internet, the great majority (84%) of the Greek
population used a mobile phone in 2008 (Obser-
vatory for the Greek information society, 2008,
p. 54), with Greece overall providing a relatively
unique picture of the adoption of mobile phones
and Internet technologies.
In order to provide a sense of the framework of
the forces leading to the enthusiastic reception of
MOBILE TELEPHONY AND
THE INTERNET IN THE
CASE OF GREECE
Looking at the case of Greece in general, one can
conclude that Greece has for long been slow in
its diffusion of new media technologies and ser-
vices and part of the North-South digital gap in
the European information society (Servaes, 2003,
p. 23). Quantitative figures about ICT adoption
in Europe and internationally (OECD Outlook
1999; Forbes and ESIS-ISPO, 1998) in the late
1990s and early 2000s provided evidence of the
delayed introduction and distribution of ICTs in
Greece, thus pointing early on to the existence of
serious barriers to the development of the Greek
information society.
In the first decade of the new century things
seem to have changed significantly with respect
to mobile telephony, albeit not equally positively
for other ICTs such as computers and the Internet.
More specifically, the 2005 Eurobarometer (EB)
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