If you are one of the millions who received a new mobile phone handset for Christmas, you are undoubtedly happy with your new toy.
Perhaps you're hoping the new model will give you something to show off down the pub, or in the office. Perhaps the new camera facility, or 3G streaming video, will somehow alter your lifestyle for the better.
With mobile phones, you see, change is everything. A raft of research over the past few years has started to point towards mobile phones as things that are changing not only our culture and our language, but our very bodies as well.
`Aproximeeting'
The culture first. The difference between mobile phones and their landline elders is that a mobile number corresponds to a person, while a landline is a place. If you call my mobile, you get me. If you call my landline, you get whoever is closest to my desk at the time.
This has many implications, but the most common one, and perhaps the thing that has changed our culture for ever, is that of "approximeeting." People no longer need to make firm plans about when and where to meet. Twenty years ago, a Friday night would need to be arranged in enough time to allow everyone to get from their place of work to the first meeting place. Now, however, a night out can be rearranged on the fly. It is no longer "see you here at eight," but "text me around eight and we'll see where we all are."
Some people see it as a weakening of commitment in society, and a continuation of a form of teenage casualness. Of course, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The same techniques the young use to arrange a quick drink are also being used to bring down governments. The most famous example is the removal from power in 2001 of Filipino president Joseph Estrada by a demonstration organized by text message chain letters.
Texting changed everything again. In their paper, "Insights into the Social and Psychological Effects of SMS Text Messaging," Donna Reid and Fraser Reid distinguished between two types of mobile phone users: the Talkers and the Texters -- those who prefer voice over text messaging and vice versa.
They found that the mobile phone's individuality and privacy gives Texters the ability to express a whole new persona: "Texters were also more likely to report that their family would be surprised if they were to read their texts, suggesting that texting allowed Texters to present a self-image that differs from the one familiar to family members and others who know them well," they said.
"Texters may feel at greater ease being their `real-self' through a text message reducing the potential repercussions that may otherwise take place in a traditional face-to-face or telephone encounter. Texting may offer Texters more control over their interactions with others by affording them visual anonymity and asynchronous communication. As such the mobile may become more a matter of identity than a simple communication tool."
Self-discovery is one thing, but clear communication quite another. The London School of Business's Business Strategy Review claims that quick e-mails and casual text messaging is ruining our ability to express ourselves clearly.
Not always welcome
Mobiles aren't always welcome, no matter how important they have become in society. When the US Federal Communications Commission proposed lifting the ban on in-flight phone calls last month, it was inundated with thousands of e-mails begging it to reconsider. The one haven from other people's conversations, the e-mails said, must be preserved. In one survey, 45 percent of British mobile phone users supported a ban on their use in public places.
Cameraphones come off worse when it comes to bans. In November, Shaun Nash, a 19 year old from Bristol, south-west England, was given six months in a young offenders' institute after taking pictures from the public gallery of the city's crown court. Cameraphones are banned in all schools in West Lothian, Scotland, as they are in many offices in the UK.
In Korea, cameraphones must, by law, make a loud shutter noise whenever a picture is taken to alert others of any nefarious snapping. Men had been caught standing behind short-skirted girls, and casually snapping away with their phone held by their side. Such "up-skirt" shots have caused laws to be passed in many countries to ban that activity, and to restrict the use of cameraphones in changing rooms and other such places.
The rare occurrence of an up-skirt cameraphone shot is sufficiently serious to merit such legislation, but what about more common annoyances, like other people? The reason other people's conversations are so irritating to overhear comes down to language, and our second category of change.
Why do we get so irritated?
Andrew Monk and his team of researchers from the UK's University of York have found that people instinctively listen more attentively to conversations where they can only hear one side. This additional attention means you can't ignore the conversation, and the tension created by the need to hear the other side means it rapidly starts to rankle.
Another researcher, Lee Humphreys, of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, has found that the irritation can be mitigated by a conscious understanding of its purpose -- you are going to be late, where exactly is this pub, and so on -- but is made worse when the call is seemingly banal twaddle. Other respondents to Humphreys' surveys said that the thing they disliked the most was the problem of too much information: arguments, break-ups and, forgive me, "intimate gynecological information". Altogether too much for the 8.10 to Euston.
Actually, as a digression, this same one-sided tension occurs when you hear a mobile phone ring and it is not answered. Because a mobile belongs to a person and not a place, you are socially restricted from answering it. But a ringing phone compels you to answer it. This conflict can drive you potty. While language affects the way we see other people's use of mobiles, mobiles themselves are changing language.
Contrary to popular imagination, however, the swapping of letters for numbers that sound that same -"gr8" for great, "ru" for are you, "cu l8r" for "see you later", and so on -- is not very common. In his paper titled Generation Txt, Crispin Thurlow, of the University of Washington, found that relatively few "letter-number homophones" are used. However, people do use onomatopoeia, comic-book exclamations (such as Yippee!) and emoticons.; -)
This just leaves our bodies. A four-year German study, to be published this month, has shown that the radiation emitted from a normal mobile will mutate the DNA of suspended cells. The researchers are looking for funding to see if the same effect occurs in living tissue.
Physical changes
Meanwhile, a 10-year study out of Sweden, which the government this week noted, said that people who had used a mobile phone for more than 10 years were more than twice as likely as those who had used mobiles for less than that time to get a form of benign tumor inside the ear on the side they held their phone. The report from the Institute of Environmental Medicine at the Karolinska Institutet, found the incidence of acoustic neuroma (AN) to be increased by mobile use; and while AN won't kill you, it can make you deaf, imbalanced, suffer from tinnitus and, in very severe cases, paralyze your face. The jury is still out on this, however. Some studies have found the same thing, while others have found no connection at all.
A paper in 2002 from Warwick University's Sadie Plant explained that dedicated mobile users had developed thumbs with much greater muscularity and dexterity than would normally be found. The teenagers studied, the paper says, also use their thumbs for actions normally reserved for forefingers, such as ringing doorbells.
This transformation, found in mobile phone users all around the world, has spawned a redefining of a Japanese word. Oyayubizoku, or "thumb tribe", once meant people who spent their time playing pachinko. Now it refers to those who prefer texting on their "keitai" to face-to-face communication.
Plant, in another paper, also wrote of the change in body language that mobiles bring about. There are two poses that people adopt while on the phone: the "speakeasy", with head held high, self-assuredly chatting away; and the "spacemaker", which is more introverted and closed. "It was observed," she wrote, "that many people sitting down in public spaces -- at cafe tables, for example, or on park benches - tend to draw their bodies up, take their feet off the ground, or otherwise create a feeling of safety and withdrawal."
And who can blame them? With approximeetings being cancelled and reformed, cameraphones sidling up skirts, and health worries, it would be understandable if your mobile made you nervous. But perhaps you needn't worry so much. After all, it's good to talk.
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