News Regarding the Center
The flip side of letting kids have cell phones
Daily Record
May 21, 2006
James E. Katz, a Rutgers University communication professor and director of the
school's Center for Mobile Communication, said the global trend of increasing cell
phone usage has benefits and disadvantages.
For example, parents provide cell phones for their children as a safety measure, but
children then may take more risks, "thinking that with the mobiles they can always
call for help or call for their parents."
Katz added that an emerging, potentially bigger problem is that kids without cell
phones or with old-fashioned, clunky ones feel they are excluded from social circles
or stigmatized.
"It used to be that kids who didn't have bikes felt left out," he explained, and now
it's children without things like iPods, the portable digital media players designed
and marketed by Apple Computer, who feel left out.
..
Although two of her four children have mobile phones, Forrester said she worries
that the cell phones isolate children.
"They stick with the people in their phone book, and it's harder to meet more people
when glued to a cell phone all the time," Forrester explained. "They would argue
that it's a different form of socialization, but I don't think that they have the
perspective of that, really."
Katz, at Rutger's Center for Mobile Communication, said that research tends to
support the idea that kids with cell phones do form cliques. However, research also
suggests that there is a benefit in that those relationships may be more stable due
to greater communication.
"I think that's just a natural progression of things," he said.
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