News Regarding the Center
April 10, 2008
...
Mr Ling, using data from Norway, has found that about half of all mobile-phone calls and text messages go to the same three or four people, typically within ten kilometres of the caller. A lot of this is what he calls "micro-co-ordination", as family members are out about town and check in with each other to plan their next stop or errand. Dad might call from the supermarket's dairy aisle to find out which brand of yogurt to buy; mum might text that she is running late and that dad needs to pick up the kids.
But such communications go far beyond the merely utilitarian. Manuel Castells, the sociologist at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, says that mobile technology affects children the most. On one hand, adolescents today become socially autonomous earlier than their parents did, "building their own communities from the bottom up" through constant text-messaging and photo-sharing among their clique, even if this circumvents the wishes of their parents. On the other hand, they also have their parents on speed-dial, and are only one button away from help if they get into trouble. Mr Castells calls this a "safe autonomy pattern."
This has some sociologists concerned. James Katz at Rutgers calls the mobile phone a new sort of umbilical cord between children and their parents and wonders whether this might in some cases "retard maturation." Sherry Turkle, the psychologist at MIT, says that wireless gadgets are, ironically, a "tethering technology" and create new dependencies that delay the important "Huck Finn moment" in young lives when adolescents first realise that they are alone on the urban equivalent of the Mississippi. Getting drunk and lost after a party is different when one push of a button summons the parental chauffeur. In 2005 a psychology professor at Middlebury College in Vermont found that undergraduates were communicating with their parents, on average, more than ten times a week.
...
|
