Don't call us …
SMH March 20, 2006
Out of touch, out of the loop. That's the modern truism of the e-generation whose best friend is a mobile phone, writes Louise Williams.
THEY are the new social outcasts: teenagers and young adults without mobile phones.
Disconnected from their peers, they risk nothing less than social desolation. The lot of the mobile phoneless is to languish waiting, condemned to a merry-go-round of missed meetings, the mobile tribes having long changed plans and moved on.
This is not the melodramatic plea of an adolescent, bent on persuading sceptical parents. Nor a thinly disguised marketing pitch. It's the conclusion of an increasing number of studies by academics and psychologists around the world.
It is no longer a matter of what you have to say, just so long as you are constantly talking or texting, and being seen to do so, says James Katz, director of the Centre for Mobile Communication Studies at the Rutgers University in the US.
Mobile phones are the portals to friendships and social networks, the ultimate measure of social status and portable shrines to self-image, he says. And if no one's calling, there's little shame in programming your phone to ring you, checking for non-existent text messages or talking up a storm with an imaginary friend.
"Kids are talking incessantly on mobiles or messaging from the back of the bus to the front of the bus; they are constantly reinforcing the message that they are in the loop, that they are part of the in group," Katz says. "To not have a phone feels like social banishment. It really is an issue of being excluded, of being an outsider."
He says about 90 per cent of young people admit they have faked a call. Often they are trying to cope with social anxiety by showing they have someone to talk to, or just want to be called away from an awkward situation, he says. But some are so determined to show off that they pretend to wrap up Hollywood deals in front of their friends.
To test the anecdotal evidence of the perils of social exclusion, Katz's centre recently subjected 100 undergraduates to 48 hours without their phones, but with internet access to soften the blow. Only 12 made it, Katz says. The drop-outs reported that people got too angry with them, emergencies came up or responsibilities demanded they pick up their phones. Three students thought their lives were happier without constant communication.
"They felt under tremendous pressure to keep in touch; they felt isolated and lost. So we actually know what happens when kids go into mobile-phone withdrawal."
An Adelaide mental health expert, Rahamatulla Mubarak Ali, of Flinders University, agrees. He interviewed hundreds of Australian teenagers for his pilot study of internet use last year but found discussion frequently drifted to mobile phones and social networks. "A phoneless person may not be included as a friend," he says.
Young people consider a mobile phone the most important item of all - it is more important than access to the internet or even television, Marilyn Campbell, from the Queensland University of Technology, says.
"Getting calls and text messages are status symbols," she says. "Ownership of a mobile phone indicates you are socially connected, independent from your family and in demand.
"Teenagers have always tried to hog the phone, but they used to have to ask permission to use the family phone and it was often a public conversation. Mobiles bypass parents in a very personal way."
A Seaforth mother, Rebecca Higgins, was determined to buy her 15-year-old son, Ben, a mobile phone, whether he liked it or not. Without one, he had caught two buses only to arrive at a meeting place and find no one there.
"Kids don't make prior arrangements any more. Everything is left to the last minute," she says. "Socially, life moves so much faster.
"I was very upset when he was left out, but I don't think I understood how his peers were thinking. They weren't trying to ostracise him; they'd changed plans at the last minute and it just didn't occur to them they needed to ring a home phone in advance."
Another group of Manly teenagers is horrified at the thought of being disconnected at all.
"Well how on earth would I know what was going on without a phone?" one asks.
A study in 2004 by the Australian Psychological Society found that almost half of teenagers without mobiles felt left out. But, significantly, more than 90 per cent of phone owners said they respected their peers without phones, suggesting social isolation is a practical communications issue, not a deliberate slight.
Australians own about 19 million mobile phones. That's fast approaching a saturated market, except among the under 18s. Eighty-seven per cent of 15- to 17-year-olds have phones, as do 64 per cent of 12- to 14-year-olds, but only 16 per cent of six- to 11-year-olds have them, according to the latest Nielsen eGeneration statistics.
Pressure for mobile phones is mounting from younger and younger children, and parents are putting up little resistance, Campbell says. Phones are seen as safety devices, and prepaid network access cards and free text message deals have reduced parental anxieties about cost.
Katz says mobiles have changed the fundamental nature of communication; it's now quantity over quality.
"There used to be a concern about quality - what did you talk about, what did he or she say? Instead, it's how many times you are contacted, how many messages you receive, how long it is since the phone beeped. People are looking to the mobile network to define their feelings.
"This is not just being driven by marketing and advertising. Ultimately, you can't sell people something they don't want. Human beings have always compared themselves to each other. Mobiles are the new human fetish. It says volumes about where you stand in the tribe."
Mobiles have also turned assumptions about the "digital divide" on their head. The thesis that the world's poorest communities and nations will fall even further behind is being played out with the internet - poverty means you are less likely to be online. But children in lower socio-economic groups in the US are more likely than their richer peers to have their own phones, Katz says. Mobiles are symbols of upward mobility everywhere, including in huge developing economies such as China and India.
But being connected isn't all positive. Teenagers and young adults can move like swarms from one social occasion to another, with little thought for the efforts of the hosts of the deserted "dull" party, or those of the party gatecrashed en masse, the tribe assembled via text. Then there's the opportunity to hide behind technology to avoid emotional situations, Campbell says. "You can text your great aunt so you don't have to bother with the social niceties of making conversation, or you can dump your boyfriend or girlfriend via text message."
Last year a large New Zealand study of 12- to 15-year-olds found that 23 per cent of mobile phone users had ended a relationship by text, 39 per cent had used text messages in an argument, 29 per cent used their phone in class and 11 per cent were woken up every night by incoming text messages.
Campbell says that just as phones are tools of social inclusion, they can be used in bullying. "It's a very new area of study, but the question is whether this is just another medium for bullying, or whether the technology emboldens bullies because they can say things via text they wouldn't otherwise say," she says.
Teenagers and young adults are so preoccupied with "connectedness" partly because they are the first generation to be unable to imagine the inconvenience of being out of touch, Katz says.
But it's also a "life stage" question. Young people are still developing their identities and value their place in social networks. Older people, rushed off their feet at work and at home, aren't always so keen on being constantly available, especially if they're expected to give up their precious time to listen to a friend who is waiting, bored, in the supermarket checkout queue.
But, Katz says, it is definitely not just the young who have mastered the modern art of inane mobile conversations. He says 20 per cent of Americans talk on the phone at the supermarket.
"We just like the contact, even if we are only talking about what's for dinner," he says. "The mobile phone seems to have migrated from a luxury to a vital communication tool."
Can we live without mobiles?
