News Regarding the Center
Reach Out and Touch No One
New York Times
April 15, 2005
As cellular phone conversations have permeated public space, so, it seems, have fake
cellular phone conversations.
How many? It is hard to say. But James E. Katz, a professor of communication at
Rutgers University, says his classroom research suggests that plenty of the people
talking on the phone around you are really faking it. In one survey Dr. Katz
conducted, more than a quarter of his students said they made fake calls. He found
the number hard to believe. Then in another class 27 of 29 students said they did
it.
"People are turning the technology on its head,"Dr. Katz said. "They are taking a
device that was designed to talk to people who are far away and using it to
communicate with people who are directly around them." .
Dr. Katz of Rutgers said the practice first drew his attention when students in
focus groups he had organized to study a wide range of cellphone use began
mentioning it, unprompted.
The habit, Dr. Katz said, is the latest technological twist in a culture that has
long embraced various forms of dissembling in the name of image, from designer
knockoff handbags to plastic surgery. Some fakers admit to programming their phones
to call them at a certain time to show off their ring tones; others wrap up
make-believe Hollywood deals in front of people they want to impress.
And phantom callers are often simply trying to cope with social anxiety by showing
that they have someone to call, even if they don't. One of Dr. Katz's students said
she pretended to use her cellphone when she was out with a group of other
college-age women who were all on theirs. Another did it to escape from a fancy
boutique where the prices were beyond her means without speaking to a salesperson.
In that sense fake callers are may not be so different from a lot of real callers,
who are always partly performing for others even as they as they appear to withdraw
into their own private space in public.
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