News Regarding the Center
Don't call us
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia
March 20, 2006
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 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.
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