Cell Phones Changing Social Group Communication

Mortimer.CA writes "An interesting article on how cell phones are changing the way people interact and get together in Japan. Some interesting quotations: 'To not have a keitai (cell phone) is to be walking blind, disconnected from just-in-time information on where and when you are in the social networks of time and place.' And the new social faux pas: 'One college student I spoke to described leaving one's phone at home or letting the battery die as "the new taboo."' The article mentions the book Smart Mobs which was mentioned on Slashdot before. I keep thinking how Marshal McLuhan said that our new inventions change the way we view the world. This is 'obvious' now, but was quite a new idea when he thought of it. In the 40s and 50s you "needed" to get a (land line) phone, then it was cars, email, and now cell phones. What's next? Is it simply a matter of keeping up with the Joneses?"

Comments

Am I the only that hates cell phones?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, not just being around people who use them, but using them myself. The whole idea of having to carry a phone with you is just... wrong. I don't want to be part of one of these groups.

Re:Am I the only that hates cell phones?

[tigertigr]

I don't know about anybody else, but I like my time alone. I like to know that if I am out for a walk or doing something outside my home, no one (unless they are in my immediate vicinity) is going to interfere with that. I like to multi-task my work, but I don't like to multi-task my play.

Re:Am I the only that hates cell phones?

[Alex Thorpe]

I have no desire to carry either a cell phone or pager, even if they were completely free. Anyone needing to reach me can call me at home, and if I'm not there, CallNotes can take a message. I've long considered pagers to be a form of those radio transmitters they tag wild animals with to track them, and I don't want to be tracked. Making a call? I hardly dial out on my phone at home that often, and it's not like there won't be a phone anywhere I go if an emergency comes up!

I use email, sometimes AIM/iChat, and a corded phone with Caller ID. That's all I need.

Re:Am I the only that hates cell phones?

[mce]

No you are not the only one.

I work for a micro-electonics research institute. One of our many activities actually is making the implementation of ever smarter and feature-rich cellphones and similar devices ever more easy. Even worse, my very own project is about designing for low power from the system level downwards. One could say we're part of the cell phone companies pipe dreams. (Actually, my project worked closely with one of the major cell phone companies in the past, and now another one is very intersted.) All that just to make very clear that I'm not oposed to the technology for the technology's sake. But neither am I in favour of it "just because".

I will personally *never* be caught having my own cell phone. I will carry/use one if the job that I'm doing at that very moment requires that I be reachable while away from any fixed phone system (which happens maybe once per year), but I flat out *refuse* to give in to the "But sir, you have to be reachable, don't you?" pressure. *I* am the one who decides when and where I want to be reachable. And when I've decided that I'm not to be reached, I will implement that very strictly. Now, I know that one can switch off those buggers when one doesn't want to be disturbed, but that is not the same thing: simply by always carrying that thing around, one creates that expection that one be reachable. Maybe not immediately, but definitely within the hour. People then just assume that they can interrupt your life at any moment, because "Hey, what else (s)he's got that cellphone for, afterall?". Then when you diseble it for more than one or two hours on end, they look at you like you're the bad guy/gall who prevented them from doing something "important" such as telling you they ran into Joe or Mary on the way to the bakery. As if that kind of chit-chat can't wait till next time you really see each other. If by then it's still worthy of being told at all, that is.

Also concerning the "but you have to be reachable" craze: Once upon a time my phone company "discovered" that I use the internet a lot when at home. This is over a plain old dial-up modem, so they figured that "he's got to be reachable, so lets enable our nice (and paying!) mailbox service for him". Now there is some poor helpdesk guy over there who probably still has not recovered from what befell him after I found out what they had done and got in touch to get it disabled again. They charge the person who calls you for leaving the message, they charge you *again* for listening to the recording, and then they charge one of you *yet again* when you finnally do get to speak to one another on the phone? Not with me. Not in a million years.

If all that makes me a social outcast, than so be it.

Re:Am I the only that hates cell phones?

[Anonvmous Coward]

"I mean, not just being around people who use them, but using them myself. The whole idea of having to carry a phone with you is just... wrong. I don't want to be part of one of these groups."

I don't see what's so 'wrong' about it. A cell phone can be a life saver. Here in Oregon there's been an on-going story about a snow-shoer that got lost on Mount Hood. I bet his family wishes he was carrying a cell phone.

In any case, I can understand the social evolutions of carrying cell phones. When you got a group of people who wants to go do stuff, it's a lot easier to mobilize when the prerequisite is that everybody's home.

Is that wrong? I don't see how. It may be bothersome to you if you've got a large group of friends that insist on calling all the time. But that's the neat thing you can do with a cell phone you can't do with a regular phone, put it on silent. Let the voice mail get it. You really can't do that with a landline for fear of blocking calls to other people who use it.

So no, I don't have the instant "oo dat's bad" reaction to it.

Re:Am I the only that hates cell phones?

[Azure_Reis]

The thing is, you don't understand the nature of the Japanese. Where confucian values reign supreme and the youth are brought up to revere group structure, being out of touch can be a BAD THING (TM). The reason for the social change among the Japanese is because the language is heirarchical; the honorific form, which is used to separate people of different ages and different levels of power, is not used on the phone. Things are more casual and you don't have to defer to those about you. It's part of a process of social evolution that is going on in Japan because of the youth.

gotta remember this is a japanease

[Archfeld]

article, They are technology crazed in a way most westerners can only begin to imagine. I used to think I was a techno geek, until I went to Japan. Now I feel like a luddite sometimes. The devices and the infrastructure are just not here in the west.

We'll see who's laughing...

[Quaoar]

...when everyone in Japan ends up with a mysterious head cancer.

Re:We'll see who's laughing...

[SlashdotLemming]

Don't worry, they'll adapt.
Brain tumors will become a new fetish.

New necessity

[nadadogg]

It is a new common assumpion that everyone has a cell phone. Thanks to digital networks, it is affordable to even the average joe to be connected at all times. They have long since eclipsed pagers as "the thing to have", making them, in some situations, more of a status symbol than as a way to stay connected. Pagers were at one time seen to be something carried by drug dealers and doctors, but never so with cellphones. This is probably due to the fact that everyone likes to have conversations, talking or by messaging. This trend is only going to continue, and get bigger and badder, hell, even smaller as well. I think that sums it up for me.

Marshall

[bernz]

I keep thinking how Marshal McLuhan said that our new inventions change the way we view the world. This is 'obvious' now, but was quite a new idea when he thought of it. In the 40s and 50s you "needed" to get a (land line) phone, then it was cars, email, and now cell phones. What's next? Is it simply a matter of keeping up with the Joneses?

ALVY
I mean, d- He can give you - Do you hafta give it so loud? I mean, aren't you ashamed to pontificate like that? And - and the funny part of it is, M-Marshall McLuhan, you don't know anything about Marshall McLuhan's ... work!

MAN IN LINE
[Overlapping] Wait a minute! Really? Really? I happen to teach a class at Columbia called "TV Media and Culture"! So I think that my insights into Mr. McLuhan - well, have a great deal of validity.

ALVY
Oh, do yuh?

MAN IN LINE
Yes.

ALVY
Well, that's funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here. So ... so, here, just let me - I mean, all right. Come over here ... a second.

MCLUHAN
[To the man in line] I hear - I heard what you were saying. You - you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.

ALVY
[To the camera] Boy, if life were only like this!

Texting before calling

[Animats]

The social convention that you send a text message before calling is significant. What it really does is give phone calls subject lines.

Some communications systems have subject lines. Memos and E-mails do, but phone calls and letters don't. Voicemail usually doesn't, although some online voice chat systems do have introductory messages. Telegrams didn't have subject lines. SMS, arguably, is subject lines only.

Subject lines help enormously in managing information overload. Subject lines for phone calls could be a real win. Especially if you could input them by voice. Hmm.

how old are we?

[fermion]

This just goes to show that anything invented after a person is 16 is weird, and anything invented after 30 is just wrong. Increasingly cell phones, SMS, etc are as necessary for teens and young adults as land line phones were for those of us that are much older. How many of young people without land phones had social lives in the 80's. How many young people without e-mail have social lives now.

Increasingly, especially for young people, dates are being made online. For friends, there is no reason to plan things out days in advance. Just call each other up at the spur of the moment and see who available to party. Is this good or bad? Not really either.

I have all this technology. People can request my attention using a number of methods. However, I do consider all of these requests. It is my choice to answer phone, reply to email, whatever. This pisses people off. Just because someone asks for my attention, am I for some reason required to drop everything and respond? I think not. Rather than showing our age and railing against rational uses of technology, I think we should accept those uses and teach how to use technology rather than have technology use you.

There was a time when people would come to your house, and, if there was time, you would put out some biscuits and make some tea and have a good sit down. This was obviously inefficient and complicated. However, I am still more inclined to talk to someone who would come to my apartment for a chat rather than randomly pick up phone and call me. OTOH, there are some conversations that are better on the phone and email. For instance, i remeber the first time a girl broke up with a friend of mine over email. It saved a useless conversation.

Socially, cellphones are for lonely extroverts.

[wackybrit]

It's entirely necessary if you're the sort of person who can't bear not to have contact with anyone human every 5 seconds.

Seriously, there are a lot of people like this, even in the nerd sector. They struggle to go for a few hours without calling someone, or having a conversation.. whereas lots of us are quite happy to sit hacking Perl or playing with servers until 4am.

So socially, no, I don't think phones are necessary, unless you're an extrovert who suffers from a loneliness complex.

Business-wise, however, cellphones are pretty damn useful. I can give an impression of being available 24/7 wherever I am, and that's worth a lot. A cellphone also allows me to easily call back into my work answerphone and catch up on calls. That's pretty useful stuff.

What I find odd...

[Black Parrot]

...is when I see friends together at a restaurant or something, and one or both of them spend the whole time yakking to someone else on their cell phone rather than talking to the person they're actually with.

You're wrong, but so is everyone else :)

[freeweed]

This is a common myth that's repeated like Gospel amongst people, but for good reasons. Allow me to elaborate:

The very earliest types of rechargable batteries, used on things like satellites, suffered from what is known as a 'memory' effect. In silly terms, it basically means that if you charge a half-full battery, it'll 'remember' where the charge started from, and only go on to do a half charge. When it reaches the halfway point, the battery 'thinks' it's empty. So you've just halved your battery life. Wash, rinse, repeat until the battery is useless.

When consumer rechargables started becoming common, early chargers (and a lot still do this today on NiCads) would keep applying current to the battery, even if it was fully charged. This 'overcharging' can seriously decimate the life of a battery - it renders useless the chemicals needed to drive the electric current.

So basically, people were overcharging their batteries left, right, and centre. Manufacturers started telling people not to continuously charge their devices, ie: leave the cordless phone off the hook for a while, things like that. Between noone explaining the principle of overcharging, and companies not fully understanding it themselves, we've moved on to 'completely drain any device before you charge it again'. Ironically this can actually lessen the life of many types of rechargables, including the new funky rechargable alkalines you see everywhere.

Anyway, the memory effect was only ever seen with batteries that never made it into consumer hands. But the myth lives on. There never was a reason for the drain-and-charge cycle. Overcharging was the problem all along.

It's not "keeping up" - look to the past

[morcheeba]

> In the 40s and 50s you "needed" to get a (land line) phone, then it was cars, email, and now cell phones. What's next?

It's not about keeping up just for keeping up's sake; it's new technologies that are useful and become part of most peoples' lives. To explain, let's go back in history... these things were all new-fangled at one time, but now, even though some people live without them, seem pretty "essential":

- 4 walls and a water-proof roof.
- clean water, delivered to your faucet.
- sanitation system - sewer, garbage, etc.
- health insurance, vacinations for diseases you don't even have yet!
- 911, police, and fire services
- a legal system, property ownership
- currency, bank accounts, lending, credit cards
- a regular job (as opposed to self-empolyed farmer/blacksmith/etc. and directly bartering your skills with others)
- prerecorded music, books.
- transportation (taxi, rail, plane, boat, postal system)
- automation (copy machines, computers)

The vast majority of us integrate these into our lives because we feel they have value that exceeds their costs, and not just to keep up.