An exploratory research on the use of cell phones by middle-class youngsters, ages 18 to 25, residing in Rio de Janeiro, revealed that they complained a great deal that their mothers controlled them unrelentingly by means of cell phones. To take a deeper look into what happens between mothers and children in this age group, a second investigation was carried out. Twenty middle-class mothers were interviewed, whose children's profile were analogous to that of the youngsters in the previous research. For all of the mothers, the main benefit of cell phones is to control their children. Nevertheless, they demonstrated to know that there's a difference between the control that they submit their children to from that that prevailed when they themselves were young. Contemporary control and surveillance theories, in fact, argue that the normative and coercive control of modernity has been replaced by "having knowledge" of what goes on, which is characteristic of the Information Era.
control; surveillance; cell phones; modernity; Information Era