Mobile Mania: Do Manners Matter Any More?
How much time do you spend on your mobile phone every day? Half an hour? Ninety minutes? Three hours? It probably depends partly on what arrangement you have with your chosen network. As “WhatPhone.co.uk” point out, if you sign up for a specified period (often around two years), yes, you will get “a free or heavily subsidised phone (even a “top of the range” model) and will pay less for your texts and calls” – but will be committed to paying a fixed sum until the contract ends.
Research by Oxford University (quoted on “Utility Exchange Online”) has, furthermore, indicated that 75% of UK mobile users in this category are on the wrong contract: They have “over-estimated how many minutes and text messages they will consume each month”. The main advantage of the alternative, “Pay As You Go” – namely, that you are “in complete control of what you spend” – is offset by the fact that you have to buy your own (sometimes expensive) mobile, calls & texts cost more and if you run out of credit you are temporarily phoneless.
Although it can seem that most people are permanently on a mobile, a study by “uSwitch.com” (reported in “Mobile Magazine”) has suggested that in fact “All text and no chat is killing conversation”: 58% of people in Britain (they say) “now rarely find the time to have long telephone conversations” and 70% admitted that they spend less than ten minutes on calls to their “loved ones” ; 24% of those questioned confirmed that that they “prefer to text or e-mail rather than engage in conversation” and for 19%, making calls is just too expensive.
Whatever your personal mobile usage, it’s unlikely to be as extensive as the case of the 39-year-old American woman highlighted by the “Daily Mail”. She apparently talked without a break on her mobile for 16 hours while on an Amtrack train going from Oakland, California to Portland, Oregon. Following complaints by other passengers to Amtrack staff, the police stopped the train and arrested her, though on what charge is not clear. The current record for a phone call (according to “Metro” newspaper) is 51 hours, made by Sunil Prabhakar of New Delhi in 2009.
Meanwhile, in Britain this month, two “mobile stories” have hit the headlines. The first concerned the 14-year-old girl on a “Dream Trip” to New York who “racked up a £3,800 mobile phone bill – just by using Facebook” (“Metro”, July 12th). This might have been avoided if she (or her mother) had heeded the advice in the “Observer” (30th June) that UK residents going abroad should check that “data roaming & automatic updates for Smartphone apps are switched off”; They should ask their provider to apply a “usage cap” and to inform them if the limit has been exceeded”; They should use a Wi-Fi signal at a café or their hotel to log onto the Internet.
The second involved Jo Clarke, the Sainsbury’s customer (at their branch in Crayford, east London), who was informed by the cashier at the checkout counter that “her shopping would not be processed until she had finished talking on her mobile phone” (BBC News). Sainsbury’s apologised to Ms Clarke and offered her a £10 voucher as compensation – but many media commentators clearly sympathised more with the cashier: “It’s a shame that Sainsbury’s chose not to support their staff”, wrote Stephanie Preece in “Worcester News”. The Evening Standard journalist, Miranda Bryant, found that the employees in the Tesco, Waitrose and Sainsbury’s stores she visited in west London condemned what they considered to be Ms Clarke’s bad manners: “If you don’t want to talk to us, use the self-service machines”.
For India Knight in the “Sunday Times”(7th July), the issue was about “knowing how to behave” – such as “eating with your mouth closed, not obstructing the pavement & not allowing one’s children to run amok in restaurants”. The Daily Mirror columnist, Tony Parsons, (July 6th) described Ms Clarke as “the patron saint of moronic mobile users”: We see “mindlessly tweeting pedestrians (he declared) walking into lampposts, the businessman shrieking into his Blackberry on a crowded train and the hordes of idiot drivers staring at the tiny little screen in their hands rather than the tiny children on the pedestrian crossing up ahead.” We should (he added) be “looking into the eyes of people we love, not at our mobile phones. We must be mad”.
Louisa Peacock in the Daily Telegraph (July 6th) couldn’t understand “ what all the fuss is about”. In her view, “Whether we like it or not, people and Smartphones are glued together these days”. She and her husband are newlyweds, but the first thing they do when they wake up in the morning is to check their phones. “The goodnight kiss really is a thing of the past. The last thing I do at night is check that I’ve set my alarm – on the phone”. Peter Hancock on the “Caterer And Hotelkeeper” website has lamented the fact that “in restaurants everywhere, there are idiots paying good money to share a meal with one person while frantically communicating with others, perhaps even with total strangers through social networks”, but making “no conversation whatsoever” with their table companion.
The “Daily Mail Online” has portrayed the Smartphone as a “modern love rival”. A “Tech-iquette Report” (they note) indicates that “one in eight adults claim their partner spends more time using their phone than speaking to them”. On a typical night out, those interviewed “spend 48 minutes on the phone – sending an average of three e-mails, 12 texts, two pictures as well as posting three messages and two updates on Twitter; 34% text or e-mail during a face-to-face conversation; 90% answer their phone during a social occasion”.
The “Weekly Gripe” website asserts that there is “nothing worse” than being in a public place and “having to listen to someone else’s so-called private conversation”. It’s not a problem that will go away. The number of mobiles in use in the UK has been estimated at over 75 million – more than the total population. A recent UN report has concluded that, by the end of 2014, the number of global “mobile subscriptions” (currently 6.8 billion) will exceed the 7.1 billion people on the planet.