Palestinian Girls, Dating and the Mobile Phone: danah boyd points to a paper titled Playing With Fire: On the domestication of the mobile phone among Palestinian teenage girls in Israel [PDF, 92K]. It looks at how mobile phone alters social dynamics, relationships, and the construction of gender in Palestine, where “boys give their girlfriends phones for the express purpose of being able to communicate with them in a semi-private manner without the physical proximity that would be frowned on.” An interesting look at how technology plays a role in people’s lives in unexpected ways.