If, as I argued above, we are now in a situation
where inequality in the strict, exploitative, mate-
rialist sense has been displaced from First World,
societies to the Third World, and if ‘inequality’ in
the First World (and almost certainly elsewhere)
is increasingly being understood through con-
sumption culture/s, then it seems to me that we
have to take both the discursive – talk – and
material culture seriously in any reclamation of
inequality. Inequality has different, situated
meanings, ones that are articulated in and
through different consumption cultures. Conse-
quently, how people talk about things – particu-
larly in consumer society/ies – is critical not just
to their understanding of things, goods and their
pattern/s of provision and use but to their consti-
tution of particular social relations, to how they
construe their relation to society and to their
understanding of inequality. Already from some
of the preceding discussion we can begin to see
how this might happen: specifically, how
‘inequality’ within a capitalist consumer society
comes to be regarded in terms of the presumed
right of individuals to buy and consume particu-
lar things. But a further instance helps make the
point even more strongly, showing how this right
to buy and consume is about consuming in
particular ways, which themselves are about
enacting key socialities through talk.^11 The
example I want to use here is the mobile phone.
The volume of mobile phone sales in the UK
over the Christmas 2000 period was estimated at
some 5 million handsets. To question mobile
phones as a basic material need within this
society however, or indeed even to get embroiled
in a debate on such terms, is to miss the point that
this gadget has come to be talked about in the UK
as necessary, for children and adults alike. Not
having one, through force of circumstance rather
than through choice, is talked about not simply as
exclusionary within this consumer culture but as
an inequality, as an inability to satisfy what is
seen as a basic need through possessing a partic-
ular good. This has more than a little to do with
its connection to practices of talk. Talk, particu-
larly the new and different forms of talk enabled
by mobile phone technologies, has been critical
to the identification of mobile phones as things
that matter. Routine safety and/or emergency talk
(‘I’ve arrived’, ‘I’m back’, ‘There’s a holdup’,
‘The train’s delayed’), quick/query talk (‘the
train’s left Darlington, pick me up in 10 minutes’;
‘they haven’t got any tuna steaks but they have
got salmon’) and text messaging are all novel
forms of talk/communication, in the sense that
they have no prior equivalents, particularly in
terms of their ability to transcend spatial fixity –
in this case by enabling talk between spatiallydislocated yet mobile individuals. But more than
this, their importance lies in the way/s they allow
for the enactment of key socialities. Providing a
child with a mobile phone is simultaneously
about being the ‘good’, safety-conscious, con-
cerned and aware parent, and about facilitating
what children construe as necessary ways of peer
group communication (witness current play-
ground use). Equally, quick/query talk between
adults is as much about the reproduction in prac-
tice of significant social relations – particularly
with the significant other – as it is about the con-
tent of the talk. But what this means in turn is
that these forms of talk have become ways in
which key social relations are practised: increas-
ingly, some of the primary ways in which signif-
icant social relations are constituted. So, ‘being
without’ is not just a matter of being without a
particular thing that matters; in this case it is
about not being able to practise ways of social
talk that are becoming increasingly routinized as
normative modes of communication. This then is
where ‘inequality’ goes beyond a particular good
to being about how the practices that surround a
particular good constitute inequalities in the con-
stitution and reproduction of social relations.
Where this takes us, perhaps, is to the situation
amongst young people in Japan, where it is
argued that the act of communicating – indeed,
being continually available for contact – rather
than talk itself, assumes primary significance and
where social relations are argued to require
mobile phones to be both formed and maintained
(The Guardian, 10 May 2001, quoting socio-
logist Hisao Ishii).
A second integral component in all this is to
rethink how key social categories might be
brought into analyses of inequality within con-
sumer societies. Made inherently problematic by
increasingly sophisticated accounts of significant
social differences, the relationship between key
social categories and inequality is messy, theo-
retically and empirically. For, if inequality/ies
are primarily understood in relation to consump-
tion cultures then it follows that these are always
in a process of production, and that their relation
to social categories is much the same, that this
can be neither read off nor presumed. And yet,
empirically, it is clear that particular social
groups – notably the elderly, single-parent
households, certain ethnic ‘minority’ groups,
benefit-dependent households – are, simply as
an effect of income, more likely to be unable
to relate to goods and services in way/s which
conform with culturally specific definitions
of ‘need’. We know then that certain groups
are more likely to be ‘disadvantaged consumers’
than others. But quite what the effect/s of52 RETHINKING THE SOCIAL3029-ch01.qxd 03-10-02 10:25 AM Page 52