Cellphones: Once a Status Symbol, Now a Necessity

"The notion of the cellphone as necessity may not be universally agreed, but if you're in doubt about whether the device is transforming American life just try wresting one away from a teenager you know.

With a popularity and versatility that spans continents and generations, the cellphone may be on its way to becoming mankind's primary communication interface and a lifestyle tool that exceeds the personal computer in ubiquity, say watchers of technology culture....

'The cellphone has moved from a helpful service appliance to a necessity,' says Tom McPhail, a professor of media studies and communication at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. 'Older Americans are realizing they are needlessly cut off without one, and for youth it has become a part of their persona and identity without which they feel naked, shunned, or isolated.'...
Voicing an oft-heard observation, CEO Silk says he recently crossed the Ohio State campus and couldn't find a teenager without a mobile or music headphone in their ear. As in decades past, the students did not congregate and share stories, he says, but rather remained connected to others solely by cellphone. Other sociologists worry that teens use all their free time messaging or talking to friends so that they no longer spend enough time in mental solitude crucial to understanding a separate self, problem solving, and allowing space for creativity and intuition." [Christian Science Monitor, via textually.org]

Couple this excerpt with the news that mobile phone subscribers around the globe totalled nearly 1.5 billion by the middle of this year, about one quarter of the world's population [CNN], and ask yourself if your library is prepared to serve these folks via cell phone in ways other than voice (instant messaging, texting, searching, etc.). Other interesting statistics from the CNN article:

• "The ITU said the growth in mobile phone subscribers had outpaced that for fixed lines, who totalled some 1.85 billion today against one billion at the start of the century, and was also outstripping the rate of increase in Internet users."


• "And by the middle of the year developing countries as a whole had overtaken rich nations to account for 56 percent of all mobile subscribers, while accounting for 79 percent of growth in the market since 2000."


• "By July this year, China was reporting 310 million users -- about one-quarter of its total population and more than the entire population of the United States, the ITU said."


• "By the end of this year, the report said, global revenues from mobile networks were likely to exceed those from fixed-line networks for the first time."