I WANT MY IPHONE

Young people today use their mobile phones for making connections and affirming relationships. However, the mobile phone can also be a practical tool for safely and communicating with friends or family who are overseas (with the use of skype and viber). Mobile phone also have many other essential uses, for example bejewelled blitz and Farmville, how would the youth of today survive without these essential applications? Mobile phones can also challenge power relations between generations. Some older generations have trouble figuring it out and can sometimes find it a rude practice.

Technology users today do not just use their mobile phones to communicate, most people use their mobile phones in conjunction with other communication tools (laptops, ipads, email ect). Still, mobile phones seem to be the only communication tool that most young people literally always have in their possession.

This constant need for communication must create some sort of problems with our social development. Louise Horstman and Mary R Power explain “SMS connects people in different physical locations with an immediacy that creates a close and integrated culture of people who remain in contact and aware of each others movements, however separated they are physically. It is a means of breaking down the barriers of time and space.” (Horstmanshof & Power, 2005).

Mobile phones, for some time have been an unavoidable part of modernity. Mobile phone users can create situations, which are not only inconsiderate but also extremely rude and offensive. General rules of social etiquette vary amongst cultures, consequently mobile phone users should comply with social standards.

Mobiles are a part of daily life, we are so used to them that they’re almost invisible. For many of us, your mobile phone is the first thing you see when you wake up and the last thing you see before you go to sleep.

Mobile phones can have a huge impact on relationships and social interaction Linguistics professor Naomi Baron explains “However, new online and mobile technologies increase the range of options at our disposal for choosing when we want to interact with whom. We check caller ID on our cell phones before taking the call. We block people on IM or Facebook. And we forward email or text messages to people for whom they were never intended.” (Baron, 2008)

Instant messaging. Blogs. Wikis. Social networking sites. Cell phones. All of these allow us to communicate with each other—wherever, whenever. (Science Daily, 2008).

The paper titled “Mobile phones, SMS and relationships” by Louise Horstmanshof and Mary R. Power included a focus group study about the role of SMS communication in young peoples lives. The paper was published in the Australian Journal of communication.

  

Discussion in the focus group comprised of questions including-

Ø  Whom the participants communicated with

Ø  Lists of numbers they held

Ø  How numbers were grouped

Ø  Rules about responses

Ø  Concepts of time

Ø  Language used

Ø  The effect on written language

Ø  Reactions to group messages

Ø  Costs and expenditures

Ø  Desired changes

Ø  Frustrations with the system

Ø  And imagined futures

Findings from the study included participants mostly sent text messages to close friends. Different groups of contacts included close friends, family, work contacts, corporations, and others not so frequently contacted. SMS was seen as a cheep, effective and convenient way of communicating one to one, as a way of maintaining social connections both locally and interstate or overseas. SMS use is an example of adapting and appropriating technology intended for other purposes to social ends. Themes discerned were desire for control of communication and protection of personal privacy. (Horstmanshof & Power, 2005).

Texters were impatient with their peers who sent group messages, unless they concerned arrangement of meeting a group of close friends. Even reluctant users admitted they could not stay in ‘the loop’ without their mobile phone.

Increasingly, young people want to store and retain information on their mobile phones. This is both for convenience, and to store messages that are precious or important. This practice of sharing and storing is an example of the disrupting and destabilising of accepted boundaries. Messages, including potentially damaging gossip intended only for the receiver, can be shared with others (Horstmanshof & Power, 2005).  All with the click of a button.

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