"While mobile communication may have entered the realm of the mundane, Rich Ling's story about how it got there is anything but. This book makes an important and timely contribution to the way we think about mobile communication in an age when many of our 'new media' are not so new anymore." -- Scott W. Campbell, Constance F. and Arnold C. Pohs Endowed Professor of Telecommunications, University of Michigan "The mobile phone is perhaps the great technology of our age, and with Taken for Grantedness, it has met its match. Rich Ling offers us a rich, subtle, profound account of how it has taken its place as the technology without which our worlds cannot make sense -- rivaling its close cousins, the clock and the car. In doing so, Ling persuades us with grace and humor, and wide-ranging reference, that the mobile phone has become the essential thing for social creatures like us. Indispensable reading from the sociologist of mobile communication today." -- Gerard Goggin, Professor and Chair, Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney.