Spanish Obsession

Article

A PBS MediaShift column by Jennifer Woodard Maderazo on Spain’s outsized attachment to mobile phones, noting that by January 2008 the country of roughly 44 million people had some 50 million active mobile phones. The piece contrasts the relative scarcity of laptops seen in public in Barcelona and Madrid with the ubiquity of phones, and describes how the mobile has become a fixture of Spanish popular culture, heavily promoted through SMS-based ringtone, football-anthem and TV-tie-in marketing.