Communication breakdown
James Katz finds a disconnect between perceptions and realities of cell phone use
Archived article from Oct 20, 2003
By Lori Chambers
Page 2 of 3
Reality: This past July, recounts Katz, a plucky Frenchman set off to paddle across the Atlantic in a one-man boat. A few hours outside Boston, thinking better of the endeavor, he picked up his satellite phone and called his mother, who bailed him out by alerting rescuers. “Would he have dared row into the ocean if he hadn’t had a phone?” asks Katz.
Countless stories attest that the cell phone becomes a lifeline in the hands of the lost, the injured, the carjacked. Indeed, more than 90 percent of cell phone users report that carrying the device makes them feel more secure, according to Katz, and personal security is a leading reason that people get cell phones. But a new adage for a new era may be, “When the going gets tough, the foolhardy get dialing.”
“People are more willing to tempt fate and get into trouble when they can just summon help on their mobile phone,” says Katz. In fact, the travails of the errant adventurous are putting enormous strains on rescue services, already underfunded and overburdened. The demands of the foot-weary, the waterlogged and the gassed-out are so great, reports Katz, “that some rescue outfits are contemplating charging people for their services.”
Moreover, warns Katz, the sense of security conferred by the cell phone may be a false one. When an emergency arises, there is no guarantee that users will have the time or opportunity to get to the phone. And even if they do, help may not necessarily be available or reachable. The huffing hikers who are in a deep canyon and can’t raise any would-be rescuers may wish they’d packed a compass instead of a cell phone.
Perception: Cell phones allow parents to maintain more control over their children.
Reality: While shopping in a phone store, Katz overheard a mother complaining sharply to the salesman about the seeming inadequacy of her teenage daughter’s pager: Whenever the girl was in a movie theater, the pager would mysteriously stop working. As the salesman presented a delicately worded defense of his product, the mother, oblivious to the smirks of customers and the skulk of her teen, continued to insist on the pager’s fallibility.
Cell phones and pagers help to maintain family order over a distance and have become a critical strand in family ties, especially in single-adult households and dual-income families, acknowledges Katz. But by making in-person supervision and monitoring less necessary, and therefore less frequent, these gadgets may actually weaken traditional family authority over children. “Parents think they can reach kids any time they want, and thus are more indulgent of their children’s wanderings,” says Katz. Children exploit this longer leash, traveling farther afield and taking bigger risks.
Not only are parents relinquishing direct supervision of their children, tech-savvy kids are finding all kinds of ways to use wireless technology as a kind of parent filter, notes Katz. The standard excuse of choice among the sneaking-home-after-midnight set, “My car ran out of gas,” is being replaced by, “My cell phone battery went dead.”
Perception: Cell phones increase social engagement.
Reality: Cell phones increase interaction with those who are familiar to the user while reducing it among those who are unfamiliar but close at hand, says Katz. An opportunity for a pleasant chat with a stranger on a train may be derailed by a cell phone call. A handshake between the fathers of rival high school quarterbacks might be fumbled by a business deal telecommunicated in the bleachers. Even inconsequential social interactions — pleasantries exchanged while holding a door, a tip on a good restaurant from a cabbie — are lost when one has a case of cell phone on the ear.
The cell phone’s effects on the public sphere reach beyond the stunting of person-to-person encounters. Polling a lecture audience in Finland — a country that embraced cell phone technology earlier and more pervasively than any other — Katz found that even after more than a dozen years of exposure, 90 percent still felt annoyed when others ignored them in favor of a cell phone call. Katz’s research indicates that this cell phone-induced public disengagement is “an almost universal irritation” that may have a biological and evolutionary basis.
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