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 \u201cWhatPhone.co.uk\u201d point out, if you sign up for a specified period (often around two years), yes, you will get \u201ca free or heavily subsidised phone (even a \u201ctop of the range\u201d model) and will pay less for your texts and calls\u201d \u2013 but will be committed to paying a fixed sum until the contract ends.<\/p>\n
Research by Oxford University (quoted on \u201cUtility Exchange Online\u201d) has, furthermore, indicated that 75% of UK mobile users in this category are on the wrong contract: They have \u201cover-estimated how many minutes and text messages they will consume each month\u201d. The main advantage of the alternative, \u201cPay As You Go\u201d \u2013 namely, that you are \u201cin complete control of what you spend\u201d \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
Although it can seem that most people are permanently on a mobile, a study by \u201cuSwitch.com\u201d (reported in \u201cMobile Magazine\u201d) has suggested that in fact \u201cAll text and no chat is killing conversation\u201d: 58% of people in Britain (they say) \u201cnow rarely find the time to have long telephone conversations\u201d and 70% admitted that they spend less than ten minutes on calls to their \u201cloved ones\u201d ; 24% of those questioned confirmed that that they \u201cprefer to text or e-mail rather than engage in conversation\u201d and for 19%, making calls is just too expensive.<\/p>\n
Whatever your personal mobile usage, it\u2019s unlikely to be as extensive as the case of the 39-year-old American woman highlighted by the \u201cDaily Mail\u201d. 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\u00a0 \u201cMetro\u201d newspaper) is 51 hours, made by Sunil Prabhakar of New Delhi in 2009.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, in Britain this month, two \u201cmobile stories\u201d have hit the headlines. The first concerned the 14-year-old girl on a \u201cDream Trip\u201d to New York who \u201cracked up a \u00a33,800 mobile phone bill \u2013 just by using Facebook\u201d (\u201cMetro\u201d, July 12th<\/sup>). This might have been avoided if she (or her mother) had heeded the advice in the \u201cObserver\u201d (30th<\/sup> June) that UK residents going abroad should check that \u201cdata roaming & automatic updates for Smartphone apps are switched off\u201d; They should ask their provider to apply a \u201cusage cap\u201d and to inform them if the limit has been exceeded\u201d; They should use a Wi-Fi signal at a caf\u00e9 or their hotel to log onto the Internet.<\/p>\n The second involved Jo Clarke, the Sainsbury\u2019s customer (at their branch in Crayford, east London), who was informed by the cashier at the checkout counter that \u201cher shopping would not be processed until she had finished talking on her mobile phone\u201d (BBC News). Sainsbury\u2019s apologised to Ms Clarke and offered her a \u00a310 voucher as compensation \u2013 but many media commentators clearly sympathised more with the cashier: \u201cIt\u2019s a shame that Sainsbury\u2019s chose not to support their staff\u201d, wrote Stephanie Preece in \u201cWorcester News\u201d. The Evening Standard journalist, Miranda Bryant, found that the employees in the Tesco, Waitrose and Sainsbury\u2019s stores she visited in west London condemned what they considered to be Ms Clarke\u2019s bad manners: \u201cIf you don\u2019t want to talk to us, use the self-service machines\u201d.<\/p>\n For India Knight in the \u201cSunday Times\u201d(7th<\/sup> July), the issue was about \u201cknowing how to behave\u201d \u2013 such as \u201ceating with your mouth closed, not obstructing the pavement & not allowing one\u2019s children to run amok in restaurants\u201d. The Daily Mirror columnist, Tony Parsons, (July 6th<\/sup>) described Ms Clarke as \u201cthe patron saint of moronic mobile users\u201d: We see \u201cmindlessly 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.\u201d We should (he added) be \u201clooking into the eyes of people we love, not at our mobile phones. We must be mad\u201d.<\/p>\n Louisa Peacock in the Daily Telegraph (July 6th<\/sup>) couldn\u2019t understand \u201c what all the fuss is about\u201d. In her view, \u201cWhether we like it or not, people and Smartphones are glued together these days\u201d. She and her husband are newlyweds, but the first thing they do when they wake up in the morning is to check their phones. \u201cThe goodnight kiss really is a thing of the past. The last thing I do at night is check that I\u2019ve set my alarm \u2013 on the phone\u201d. Peter Hancock on the \u201cCaterer And Hotelkeeper\u201d website has lamented the fact that \u201cin 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\u201d, but making \u201cno conversation whatsoever\u201d with their table companion.<\/p>\n The \u201cDaily Mail Online\u201d has portrayed the Smartphone as a \u201cmodern love rival\u201d. A \u201cTech-iquette Report\u201d (they note) indicates that \u201cone in eight adults claim their partner spends more time using their phone than speaking to them\u201d. On a typical night out, those interviewed \u201cspend 48 minutes on the phone \u2013 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\u201d.<\/p>\n The \u201cWeekly Gripe\u201d website asserts that there is \u201cnothing worse\u201d than being in a public place and \u201chaving to listen to someone else\u2019s so-called private conversation\u201d. It\u2019s not a problem that will\u00a0 go away. The number of mobiles in use in the UK has been estimated at over 75 million \u2013 more than the total population. A recent UN report has concluded that, by the end of 2014, the number of global \u201cmobile subscriptions\u201d (currently 6.8 billion) will exceed the 7.1 billion people on the planet.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u201cWhatPhone.co.uk\u201d point out, if you sign up for a specified period (often around two years), yes, you will get \u201ca free or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colindgordon.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colindgordon.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colindgordon.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colindgordon.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colindgordon.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=653"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/colindgordon.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":654,"href":"https:\/\/colindgordon.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653\/revisions\/654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colindgordon.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colindgordon.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colindgordon.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}