My interest in things related to mobile communication is boundless so I picked up Mobile Communication and Society by Manuell Castells and a series of co-authors from my heap of books with enthusiasm. It turned out to be old – at least by the standards of this technology. The hardback came out in 2006, this paperback in 2007. This means that it seems extraordinarily out of date. That in itself is revealing. The diffusion of mobiles in the developing world was already amazing in 2005 (from close enough to zero in 2000), and the pace of growth has continued.

But it's the issues which seem salient which really show how rapidly things have evolved. When this book was written, the researchers' concerns were issues such as gender imbalances, the youth culture of mobiles, their role as status symbols. Near ubiquity, even in quite poor countries, has overtaken all of these concerns which stemmed from the fact that some social groups got earlier access to mobile communications. Today's issues are very different – the scope for the mobile web and applications that might support, the types of business models that work with mobile technology, the interaction of mobiles with social networks and the social and political implications. It's a different world in 2009 than in 2007.

The authors are sociologists, who write in a version of academese I always struggle with. Even so, and despite the age of this book, I found some new thoughts. I hadn't before linked the spread of mobile to the recent milestone in urbanization, with half the world's population now living in towns and cities (p57). I was intrigued to realize that pagers are still (or were in 2005) quite widely used in the US, partly because of cost, and partly because it gives users more control over the ability of their employers to get in touch with them at all times. And I knew about but was interested to read again about the evolution of the main point of the mobile – from providing mobility to providing a personal communications device – making the ability to retain the same number when switching provider a key consumer protection.

Another big plus is that the book cites my work in Vodafone's research programme, along with the other authors of our landmark 2005 Africa: the Impact of Mobile Phones report. Since then we've covered mobile transactions and India. The next phase will be research on the mobile web.