What’s Good for a Business Can Be Hard on Friends
By ANGEL JENNINGS NYTIMES
Cellphone plans that encourage subscribers to talk mainly to people in the same network are having unintentional social effects.
A month ago, Brandy McDowell sat down with her longtime friend, Kezia Chandler, and told her she had switched cellphone carriers. Their relationship has not been the same since.
Now, they barely speak. Ms. Chandler rushes Ms. McDowell off the phone when she calls during her lunch break. And long conversations about schoolwork and relationship woes have been reduced to sound bites.
Maybe they should blame the cellphone carriers. The carriers, after all, set up plans that encourage subscribers to talk mainly to people in the same network. The companies say they are simply trying to recruit and retain customers.
But what was set up as a purely business strategy is having an unintentional social effect. It is dividing the people who share informal bonds and bringing together those who have formal networks of cellphone “friends.”
That is most true for people younger than 25 because they are the ones who see the cellphone as an extension of themselves. They are constantly sending text messages, making calls, checking the time, scheduling appointments, calculating math, taking photos, playing games or looking up something on the Internet.
Those who talk the most on the phone are ages 18 to 24, according to a study of cellphone use by Telephia Inc., a San Francisco research firm that follows cellphone trends. In the first quarter of 2007, this group sent and received on average 290 calls a month, the study found. Text messaging was highest, Telephia said, among 13- to 17-year-olds, who averaged 435 messages a month.
By contrast, cellphone users 45 to 54 years old spoke on the phone 194 times, on average, a month and sent only 57 text messages.
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