Mobile Phones: Call me sociable?

I will aim to have a new article up every sunday, so here's number two :).

Mobile phones are everywhere, we see adverts everywhere telling us to buy them, the mobile industry tuns over £13.6bn in 2005; and you probably own one. Are they really making us more sociable, or do we own one just because everyone else does?

In 2003: 75% of UK adults owned a mobile phone, with 8% of UK households having a mobile as their only method of communication (from national statistics). Four years later, those statistics have probably increased.

A mobile phone is one of the greatest examples the technologically advanced world: always on, always accessible, and ever more advanced. Many people's lives go on hold when they lose their phone. Are they really worth all the hype?

In theory they enable us to communicate, they provide the ability to have direct person to person voice contact, pretty much anywhere in the world. They enable us to contact loved ones when we are late home; they enable us (particularly as students) lose the hand cuffs of the land line, in favour of the liberating mobile.

This liberation comes at a heavy price: we are now tied to our mobiles, replacing handcuffs for a ball and chain; we construct our social lives around them; we become irate at other peoples' use of mobile phones in public.

Communication between two humans face-to-face relies on non verbal communication. This was first noted by Darwin when he described facial gestures as a form of communication, and then expanded into many fields: body language; gesture; facial expressions; eye contact; clothing (and hairstyles); etc. When using a mobile phone, we rely on using just our vocal communication in order to get our point across; this can often lead to a miscommunication because the added qualifiers gained from these non verbal cues are missing. Even some vocal cues, emotion and speaking style, may be lost when the quality of the verbal communication is decreased.

Mobile phones enable us to be selfish, we are given the chance to pick and choose who we decide to interact with in any situation (as long as there is signal). We are no longer forced to talk with those around us, instead we could call or text a friend to distract us. How often have you been sitting around with a group of friends, when a phone rings and someone breaks up the conversation by explaining to the voice at the other end that they are in a pub having a very nice drink with friends?

There is a serious backlash against mobile phones, especially using them on forms of public transport. (Next time you are on a bus/train, count the number of “I'm on the train...” conversations.) There is a group, People Against Cellular Phones, who are dedicated towards restricting mobile phone usage just to private homes. In response to, “Do I need a mobile phone?”, many guardian readers started slating the devices. Jon Stewart at Edinburgh has the interestingly titled, “Mobile Phones: Cigarettes for the 21st Century” website.

The increase in personalisation and self definition by mobile phones leads to an increase in the imposing of individuality of others onto our daily lives. Whole subcultures have been defined by specific ring tones (remember Crazy Frog?), this could be interpreted as bonding by their common theme tune and thus sociable, or as an effort to annoy and exclude others.

Mobile phones can enable you to be more sociable, by talking to a distant friend; even if you are on your own in a private location, they could be in a quiet public place, your phone call could have distracted numerous others. You could have used a land line and called their land line, thus ensuring that they are at home. If you are running late, you can call ahead to warn the other person, but have mobile phones enabled us to have more of an excuse to be late and decreased our priority to be punctual?

With everyone around you owning and using a mobile phone to text and contact loved ones, it would be quite excluding to not own a mobile phone as you would be unable to communicate on a level playing field (especially with text).

Mobile phones are useful, there is no denial there, but do they really provide a benefit to social aspect of society? People used to live without them in the not so distant, quite sociable, and quite technological past.

As a short post script, I appreciate that as students they are useful where it is often difficult to have a fixed land line. The case for mobile phones for emergencies is also very strong, but that would not be of a direct social function.