Mobile communications are rapidly merging with fixed-line telephony, the internet, and entertainment. Telecommunications convergence is a many-faceted process, creating radically novel and complex patterns of mediated culture, posing new challenges to the humanities.

While the triumphal march of mobile telephony continues – by 2008 more than half of the world's population had become mobile phone users – mobile communications are merging with fixed-line telephony, the internet, and entertainment. Telecommunications convergence is a many-faceted process, creating radically novel and complex patterns of mediated culture, posing new challenges to the humanities. The various dimensions of convergence – digital, technological, socio-cultural, linguistic; of content, devices, businesses, markets, even of scientific theories – do not fuse seamlessly. The volume contains papers by, among others, Mark Turner, Gerard Goggin, Zoltán Kövecses, Dieter Mersch, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, and Anthony Townsend.