Press News

Budapest, September 26, 2008

With the spread of the mobile phones and the mobile Internet the concept of community and circle of friends have gained a new meaning. This is one of the focal topics of the joint research of T-Mobile and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA), which commands international professional interest, and the lectures to be held about the latest findings of the research.

The researchers discuss their findings at a three-day conference, which opened on September 25 in the MTA headquarters in Roosevelt square, Budapest, under the title “Mobile Communications and the Ethics of Community Building Networks”. The conference featuring also prominent international experts was opened by József Pálinkás, President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Christopher Mattheisen, Chairman-CEO of Magyar Telekom. The latest – seventh – English-language study on the joint MTA–T-Mobile research program entitled “Integration and Ubiquity: Towards a Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence” was presented to the press before the conference.

MTA and T-Mobile have been conducting joint social science research since 2001.
At the conference entitled “Mobile Communications and the Ethics of Community Building Networks” reputed researchers and scientists of the world will analyze the causes, consequences, surprises, particular features and prospects of the triumph of the mobile phone. Papers will be presented, among others, by noted experts from Norway, the United States, Germany, South Korea and France.

The audience will hear about fifty lectures, which will discuss, among other topics, how the mobile phone and the Internet are merging and how the increasingly diverse community surfaces promote the growth of closer and broader communities. How they revolutionize the forms of building and maintaining relationships and how they rewrite the ethics and rules of social contact and human behavior. The mobile world presents a new challenge for social scientific and philosophical analysis: the lectures will give an in-depth approach to the questions of ethics and the moral values and norms that guide human actions.
The special topics of the conference include observation, the exposure of intimacy, the concept of chosen unavailability, the blogosphere, civil journalism, the new style of political communication, mobile learning, lifelong learning, the impact of the community networks on children with dyslexia.

For more information on the conference, visit http://www.socialscience.t-mobile.hu/2008   and on the research   http://www.mobilkutatas.t-mobile.hu.