Cybertalk at Work and at Play

Visible Language, 2005 by Baron, Naomi S

Nearly ninety percent of people in the 20-24 year-old range reported using mobile phones, but only seventy-nine percent in the 35-39 year-old range did so. When it came to specifically using text messaging services, the disparity grew: eighty-three percent of 20-24 year-olds but only thirty-nine percent of 35-39 year-olds. In Norway, the age differential seems to set in early. Ling reports that while Norwegian teenagers and young adults as a group were sending between 6 and 9 text messages a day (peaking at nine messages daily for females 16-19 years old), the number plummeted to fewer than three daily in the 25-34 year-old cohort. In fact, another study of Norwegian teenagers that Ling references found that among heavy mobile users, the number of phone calls began to outpace the number of text messages by the time users were age 18.

Phone-Based Communication at Work

The mobile phone can be a highly practical device. American professionals (businessmen and women, lawyers and such) are quite familiar with using the voice functions of mobiles to transact business while they wait for planes, walk down the street and (alas) drive, but commonly execute written cybertexts through email on a Blackberry. Their European counterparts also conduct business by speaking on mobiles, but written CMC missives are typically done as text messages on the same mobile phone. In Europe, texting also fills more pedestrian work-related functions, as I learned a few years back from an ad in the high-speed train between Heathrow Airport and Paddington Station in London. A commercial service was offering to pick up your luggage when you arrived at Heathrow, deliver it to your home or hotel and send you an SMS when it had arrived. As an American, whose phone at the time could not handle SMS even in the US, I felt like a visitor from an underdeveloped country.

Ling devotes two chapters to the practical side of mobile communication, looking at issues of safety (Chapter 3) and coordination of everyday life (Chapter 4). Even before the events of September 11, 2001 in the US and of March 11, 2004 in Madrid, using mobile phones in times of emergency (or in case of emergency) has been seen as a vital function of mobiles._10 Ling reports that as early as 1999, approximately eighty-two percent of the participants in focus groups across Europe fully agreed with the statement "The mobile phone is useful in an emergency." A Norwegian study done in 2001 revealed that people 50 years of age and older were more likely to value mobiles in case of emergency than were younger cohorts. However, as teenagers on both sides of the Atlantic will tell you, parents are often the driving force behind their children getting mobile phones "for safety sake."

Safety may be a prime reason for procuring a mobile, but coordination of everyday life is, for many people, the major reason for using it. Ling has extensively studied how Europeans harness the mobile phone to orchestrate the business of day-to-day activities involving other people (what Ling calls micro-coordination): planning what movie we will see tonight, reminding our spouse to pick up the dry cleaning, telling our mother we are staying after school to work on a project. In a study of SMS messages sent by a random sample of Norwegian SMS users in 2000, Ling found that nearly forty percent of the messages dealt with either direct coordination of activity ("The car is done so we can get it at 4") or requests for mutually beneficial behavior ("Remember to buy bread").