America Untethered

American Demographics, March 1, 2003

Byline: HASSAN FATTAH

As they sat on a train headed toward Washington, D.C., two women called home on their cell phones and were struck by the same thought. On a Virginia highway about 200 hundred miles south of their location, a 30-year-old man picked up his cell phone to set up meetings and had a similar epiphany. Thousands of miles away in San Francisco, a man long reluctant to carry a cell phone stopped to ponder the same question: How did we ever live without cell phones?

Since the early days of the Dick Tracy comic strip, Americans have envisioned a world of anywhere, anytime communication. That vision came to life when the first commercial cell phone hit the market in 1984. Almost two decades later, slightly more than half of all Americans - about 150 million people - tote mobile phones, feeding a $94 billion industry (not including hardware) that's growing 15 percent each year. But the telecom business isn't the only area revolutionized by America's wireless transformation. As cell phones reach deeper into our lives, they're beginning to create a deeper impression on the American psyche. To hear researchers and ethnographers tell it, wireless communication is beginning to have a notable impact on our social behavior - one that could have a long-lasting effect on our society and the world around us. "We're at a transitional point where a lot of new rules are being set," says Robbie Blinkoff, principal anthropologist and managing partner at Context-Based Research Group in Baltimore. "The basic metaphor of the phone is changing. What [it] does today is connect you to an informal network."

At least four ethnographic studies in the U.S. and Europe released in 2001 and 2002 have detected signs of changing habits due to wireless communication. Thanks to mobile phones, the researchers found, Americans and Europeans may be becoming more independent and spontaneous. But they may also be growing prone to planning at the last minute and arriving at meetings late. They're sharing more of their personal lives in public but are also forcing a redefinition of basic etiquette. This increasing accessibility is allowing work to impinge even more on family lives even as it enhances social lives.

What makes these empirical findings important now is the sheer numbers of people who have cell phones in this country. By the middle of 2002, the legions of Americans carrying cell phones were each spending an average of $53 a month to talk 442 minutes on their mobile phones - about 100 minutes more per month than they did in 2001. All in all, Americans log more than 53 billion minutes chatting, getting directions and letting someone know they will be a little late. (See sidebar.)

Ethnographers and social scientists had long wondered what the portability of cell phones would engender, but they didn't have much data to go by. Until recently, most studies about wireless phones focused on design and technology issues. The latest ethnographic studies, however, have yielded significant clues about cell phone users' communication habits. Almost all observed changes in how cell phone customers form relationships and define a sense of time and place. Whether here in the U.S. or in other countries, the clearest changes were in the social networks people were creating.

One of the first of this new crop of studies, conducted in 2000 by Leysia Palen, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, focused on new cell phone users. Palen's team followed 19 people in Colorado who had never owned a cell phone but had recently ordered one. The researchers watched newly wired users at work and play, and found that one of the biggest differences was that they became more accessible to their social network. Palen and her team observed that mobile phones supported entire social networks and relationships. The researchers interviewed participants regularly and watched their habits change over a six-week period. Consistently, Palen found participants more flexible in how they arranged their schedules and gradually more willing to speak on a cell phone in public.

Take "Matthew," a study participant and full-time pastor who began managing his social network between Sunday services with his mobile phone. His congregation leased meeting space on Sundays only, requiring him to be on a flexible schedule and accessible outside of regular working hours. "Having programmed all 60 of his parishioners' numbers into his phone, Matthew calls anyone and can be reached anywhere," Palen notes. "A mobile telephony benefit implied in this account is the ability to manage multiple roles simultaneously, possibly keeping one's location ambiguous."

Palen also found that mobile phones help sustain social ties for purely psychological and emotional value. For instance, "Elizabeth," a meteorologist in Colorado, began to use her mobile phone to maintain social ties with her large family. The phone's portability and the financial advantages of her family calling plan made it possible for her to stay in close contact with them, Palen writes. Moreover, by regulating who had her mobile number, Elizabeth knew that incoming calls were most likely from a relative or good friend, and she no longer had to screen her calls when the phone rang.