The Impact of New ICTs on Everyday Life

CS4003 Information Society 1

Karen Kiely 0643564
Sharon Brosnan 0651869
 CONTENTS

● Introduction
● How we split the workload
● Annotated Web Bibliography
● Description of field study
● Discussion of findings
● Critical reflection
● Conclusions
● Reference List
 INTRODUCTION

“The impact of new ICTs on everyday life.”

In today’s world we are surrounded by technologies. The technology of the mobile phone
has been developing for a number of years and is expanding throughout the world at a “breath-
taking speed”. (Geser, 2004) It has come to the point where mobile phones are maturing as a
technology, becoming almost ubiquitous. It’s hard to imagine a time when the majority of the
population didn’t own a mobile phone. The mobile phone has, without a doubt, brought about
changes to our everyday lives. It is no longer unusual to see people using mobile phones in a variety
of contexts (Palen, Salzman, Youngs, 2000). It is even believed that the mobile phone would have
been accepted in all human societies in the past (Geser, 2004). The mobile phone has had a strong
impact on social life and people are willing to spend a lot of time and money on this form of
communication, even in comparison with PCs and the internet.
With the full amount of phones exceeding the total number of TVs in 2001 (Geser, 2004),
we can see that they are not seen as just communication devices but also as forms of entertainment
with MP3 players, cameras, games and internet. It has become a central part of social life, with
people of all ages and ethnicities using them as time managers as well.
Originally the mobile phone would have been used for broadcasting, then bilateral
communication and now with WAP and 3G technologies it is back to a form of broadcasting. They
are used for a limitless amount of functions, as both a phone and multimedia device, they can
“transport voice, text messages, pictures, musical sound, software programs and anything else
coded in digital format.” (Geser, 2004).
A major service from the mobile phone is SMS. Over the years people have become aware
of the benefits of it. It is cheap and can be done in a private way; instead of having a conversation
that people in a social setting can overhear, texts can be done quite discretely. It also allows the
option of postponing the responding to a text if necessary. People of all backgrounds, of all ages,
worldwide are using this technology.
The mobile phones of today are cheap, small, energy efficient and easy to use. It has been
found that people use their mobile phones to strengthen their image and existing relationships. The
users can control their social network by only letting certain people have their phone number. It also
lets the user show that he/she has strong social contacts by being busy with the phone, texting
someone or receiving/making a phone call. Mobile phones are popular as they allow users to be
contactable but are also so popular as users can control their accessibility, they can decide whether
or not their phone is on, if the ring tone is on or off, or can send the ‘busy tone’ to callers if they so
please.
In today’s world however the mobile phone is not always accepted. They can be seen as a
nuisance to society as well as a benefit, they can be loud and disruptive, loud ring tones and people
having a conversation in public. The mobile phone is in fact blurring the social and working
boundaries, depending on the user this can be annoying or of great advantage. Here, we are aiming
to research into the usage of the mobile phone by three different sub-cultures. We hope to analyse
our findings and display the enormous social impact the mobile phone has on our respondents.
 HOW WE SPLIT THE WORKLOAD

Firstly, we held a brainstorm session between use where we thought up aspects of a day in
the life of a mobile phone. We thought of our own use of the device and wrote down everything we
thought of. We then used this to think of relevant and significant questions, Together, we plannned
the intervivew, came up with potential respondents, thought about location and time of interviews
etc. We then made it each our business to find willing respondents. Karen took on the task of
finding a parent, Sharon the business male in his 20s and the adolescent girl sub-culture.
Carrying out our interviews, we were both present for each. We each asked questions of the
respondents and added some on-the-spot questions also. Analysing the data collected, Karen used
the information found in the parent's interview and Sharon in the young adult male and the
adolescent girl.
We split the written workload according to the structure provided. We decided to carry out
our own respective web research and annotations for the webliography. We both made sure we both
did not choose the same papers and aimed to write annotations on at least four each. We also each
made our own contributions to the final reference list.
Dividing the structure we came to the conclusion that Sharon would write up a relevant
introduction, discussion of findings (business male, adolescent girl) and critical reflection; Karen
'how we split the workload', description of field study, discussion of findings (parent) and
conclusion.
 ANNOTATED WEB BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ling, R., Yttri, Birgitte (2002) '“Nobody sits at home and waits for the telephone to ring:”
Micro and hyper-coordination through the use of the mobile telephone'
This article seeks to outline the social issues associated with the adoption of the mobile phone. It
also aims to analyse differences in the use of the mobile phone between different age groups. The
authors attempt to illustrate this by focusing on the concepts of micro- and hyper-coordination. The
article documents and evaluates data collected from a series of group interviews with mobile phone
users of different age brackets. It is concluded that teenagers seem to utilise their mobile phones for
expressive purposes as well as instrumental purposes.

Ling, R. (2001) 'Adolescent girls and young adult men: Two sub-cultures of the mobile
telephone'
This article aims to investigate into the two sub-cultures of the mobile phone: adolescent girls and
young adult men and exhibit the role of the devices within these sub-cultures. Ling utilises a series
of surveys on the use of mobile telephony among teenagers. As well as this, he analyses a survey
carried out by Statistic Norway on media use. Ling comes to a number of conclusions; young adult
males have a high use of voice telephony and low use of texting, compared with adolescent girls
who mainly use their mobile phones to send text messages, among other interesting facts.

Love, S. (2005) 'The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone's Impact on Society'
This article aims to concisely review Rich Ling's book 'The Mobile Connection' and put across the
points Ling makes in the book. It simply explains, chapter by chapter, Ling's research while trying
to distinguish the social impact of mobile phone use in public places and society in general. He
concludes by praising the book and its contents.

Henderson, S., Taylor, R., Thomson, R. (2002) 'In touch: Young people, communication and
technologies'
This article assesses the place of ICTs in the lives of young people, emphasising on the place of
mobile phones in their social and domestic lives. The authors aim to analyse data retrieved from a
series of surveys of young people. They chose 120 subjects from five contrasting locations across
the UK so as to get a good mixture of respondents. First, they focus on the respondents usage of
technology before moving on to defining their contribution to particular forms of sociality. The
authors recognise, the the conclusion, that these young peoples' phone culture would change with
different needs, among other interesting points of information.

Aoki K., and Downes E. J. (2003) ‘An Analysis of Young People’s Use Of and Attitudes
Towards Cell Phones.’

This paper looks towards the motivations of users in adapting technologies and behavioural
characteristics in order to determine the motivations and feelings about usage. The aim of the
investigation of these is to make clear and understand how the motivation for adoption affects the
use of technology.
The investigation took place on college students and their cell phone usage using both qualitative
and quantitative methods, focus groups and surveys respectively. The main topics examined were
phone ownership and usage for “feeling safe”, “time management”, “financial benefits”, and to
“keep in touch”. It was found that people also use their cell phones for information access, parental
contacts and privacy management.
Investigators used Q factor analysis in order to quantify subjectively. Correlation analysis was
conducted also. This was used to examine the relationship between attitudinal factors and
behavioural variables. Using this method it was found that the longer a person owned a phone, the
most calls the person received.
This paper also found that many of the cell phone users use their cell phone as opposed to their
landline, even when available.
Overall this paper found that the advances in technologies changes users’ (particularly young
users’) attitudes toward those technologies, generating new social and cultural phenomena that
changes the way the technology evolves.

Palen L., Salzman M., & Youngs E. (2000) ‘Going Wireless: Behavior & Practice of New
Mobile Phone Users’
The aim of this paper was to understand how and why people use phones in a range of situations,
their process of discovery of the phone and the integration of the phone into their daily life. It also
describes the differences and similarities between the acceptance of the landline in the early 20th
century and the mobile phone today. Overall the paper focuses on expanding the works of Ling and
Yittri and to understand the users changing perceptions of social propriety.
In order to do this 19 new mobile phone users were closely tracked for the first six weeks after
getting a phone. The subjects were varied in age and occupation. The investigation took place using
qualitative methods. Interviews were conducted over the six weeks with regular voice calls and
voicemail contact with the respondents.
At the beginning of the study the new users initially had narrow ideas for how they would make use
of their phone, but they applied the phone to included social interactions. By the end of the six-
week period it was found that the users had evolved the use of their phone to resonate with their
own unique lifestyle.

Geser H. (2004) ‘Towards a Sociological Theory of the Mobile Phone’

This paper discusses the differences and similarities of the social integration of the landline and
mobile phone. In the past the landline helped in the development of large metropolitan systems
while the mobile phone is attuned with spatial mobility. The paper examines the stages of the
mobile phone and the investigators use quantitative perspective to study the amount of mobile
phone usage in people’s lives under the headings
● Usage Intensity
● Usage Breadth
● Usage Variety
It also investigates why SMS is so popular today, taking privacy and cost into account. It also
studies the impact it has on relationships, how it strengthens them and reinforces social controls.
The investigators took a special interest in how users can control their social network by restricting
the number of people who have their phone number, what phone calls they answer and the concept
of a text language developing in a social circle.

Ito M., Okabe D. (2003) ‘Technosocial Situations: Emergent Structurings of Mobile Email
Use’
This paper looks at the integration of the mobile phone into social life, and how the mobile phone
operates in particular social settings. The mobile phone is criticized for the ways it disrupts the
existing social norms but since the mobile phone has become a big part of the world today there are
new social practices around the mobile phone. This paper studies teenagers in Tokyo, Japan and
their use of the phone, collecting a detailed account on when and where particular forms of mobile
communication was conducted. The investigators found that the new technologies of the mobile
phone and the new social practices it brings with it may clear away the old social practices. The
authors found that mobile phones weaken the old social norms but bring about new ones and
heighten accessibility.
 DESCRIPTION OF FIELD STUDY

Participants recruited

To carry out our field study, we first had to think of certain categories of participants to interview.
We came to the conclusion that our study would benefit from having three different respondents
from three different categories. First, we chose an adolescent girl, a full-time science student, aged
18. From reading Ling's paper (2001) 'Adolescent girls and young adult men: two sub-cultures of
the mobile telephone', we felt that analysing the mobile phone usage of this sub-culture would give
us some interesting facts. Because mobile telephony is being adopted on a bigger scale by younger
generations, interviewing a teenage girl about her mobile phone habits, we felt, would be useful in
analysing the usage among the the teenage population. As Ling describes, the mobile phone plays a
major part in establishing oneself as independent from one's parents. This lack of parental
supervision over the communication channel of the mobile phone gives teenage girls an opportunity
for individualization and development of social networks. (Ling, 2004)
Secondly, we opted to interview a young adult male on his use of mobile phones. The young
adult male we chose is in his 20s, working full time. Drawing some information, again, from Ling
(2001) we feel we can analyse this sub-culture in depth to gain some insight into the usage of
mobile phones among an older generation. The mobile telephone facilitates the coordination in a
nomadic period of life for young adult men. Their usage is not as focused on emancipation, rather
the establishing of careers, finding mates and managing one's social life. We aimed to determine the
reasons and details about their social motives behind their use of mobile telephony.
The third sub-culture we decided to study was the parent. We chose a woman in her early
fifties, with four grown-up children and a full-time job as a special needs assistant. We proceeded to
look into her usage of the mobile phone, as with the two previous interviews. It is obvious that this
sub-culture wouldn't have adapted to the technology of the mobile phone as well as the younger
generations and we found this to be partly true with our subject. (Love, 2005) states that the parent
understands the basic communicative function of the mobile phone but doesn't understand its
advanced manipulation and, by extension, its symbolic position in the child's life (Ling, 2004) As
well as this, as Ling describes in 'Nobody sits at home', it was found that parents utilise the mobile
phone as a coordination device. Having researched into this aspect of the social use of the mobile
phone, we were keen to analyse our respondent's attitude towards the mobile phone and
coordination.

Structure of interview

To aid us in the construction of the interview, we first brainstormed our own personal
mobile phone use. We thought in the context of ‘a day in the life of a mobile phone’. This helped us
gather some of the primary functions of the mobile phone. Considering then, the structure of our
interview, we felt that firstly, we would need to gather some general information about our
respondents. This would include gender, age, occupation etc. Having received this information, we
could compare and contrast our findings at a later stage with respect to this general information. We
structured the first few questions this way.
Then we proceeded to add questions that related to the general mobile phone usage of the
respondent. This included questions such as 'What make is your mobile phone?'; 'How long have
you had this phone?' etc. Again, we felt it would be interesting to identify correlations between the
three different age brackets regarding mobile phone make etc.
Finally we constructed questions that would highlight the respondent’s usage of the mobile
phone in a social context. We included questions like ‘what group of people would you spend most
of your mobile phone interaction with?’ suggesting answers such as partner, siblings,
parents/children, close friends, larger network of friends or work colleagues. We asked our
respondents to rate these in order of importance. Taking quotations from a number of papers, we
posed questions to our respondents on the expression of personality through the mobile phone, the
coordination of social activities through the medium of mobile telephony and the usage of the
mobile phone while within a different social network, among many others.

How the study was conducted/ethical considerations

We decided to conduct our interviews separately for each respondent. We felt that should
the interviews have taken place in a group setting, respondents may feel pressure to conform to
social expectations (Halpin, 2007). Carrying our three separate interviews, we believed the
respondents could answer truthfully without fearing their answers would be ridiculed or seen as
‘different’.
We conducted the study by first contacting our chosen respondent. This was the teenage girl,
whom we will refer to as respondent A. We asked her would she partake in an interview to research
into the social impact of ICTs on everyday life. We assured her that she would remain anonymous
and her opinions would be used for research purposes only. We also let her know that she had the
right to withdraw from the study at any time should she so wish. When she agreed, we set a date
and time for the interview to take place. We chose a private setting, namely in her own home. We
chose this setting as we believed it was important to put the respondent at ease and that she didn’t
feel under any kind of pressure or feel any kind of embarrassment, which may have occurred should
we have conducted the interview in a public setting.
The interview with respondent A lasted approximately 45 minutes, during which we posed a
number of questions in a semi-structured manner. We recorded our respondents’ answers and
opinions by means of quick taking down of notes. We elaborated on subject A’s answers by posing
further questions to her, relating to her original answers. Following the interview, we thanked
respondent A for her time and let her know that she had permission to see the end result of the
research project if she would like.
For our second respondent, we made contact with a young adult male we felt would be
appropriate for the interview. Unfortunately, the male we had chosen was unable to attend an
interview due to work commitments. We then chose another respondent who, luckily, was available
for interview. We shall refer to this respondent as respondent B. Again, before the interview, we let
respondent B know of his rights as an interview respondent. The subject had no qualms about this
so we proceeded to arrange a date and time for the interview to occur. We chose the respondent’s
workplace as the location for the interview. This was possible as he was self-employed.
The actual interview with respondent B took place in about 50 minutes. We noted the
subject’s answers, again, by taking notes. We asked a number of questions, many of which were
exactly the same as those that were asked of subject A. However, some questions differed as we
were aiming to prove different points. We also developed the questions differently because of the
subject’s differing social status from subject A.
Lastly, we contacted the third respondent. We contacted a mother by means of mobile
telephone and explained the study and interview. We shall refer to this respondent as respondent C.
We let her know of her rights and there were no problems with this. We chose the private setting of
the home for respondent C. The interview took place at the weekend, when the subject was not
working and the interviewer was not in college.
The interview with respondent C lasted approximately 45 minutes. Again, as with subjects A
and B, the interviewer noted the answers through the same means as previously. The interviewer
expanded on the subject’s answers by posing questions relating to quotations taken from papers that
were deemed useful, interesting and thought provoking. Following the interview,the interviewer
thanked the respondent for her time.
 DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS

From analysing the data we received from the interview with our three respondents, we
came to a number of conclusions. However, we will discuss the conclusions in more detail in the
critical reflection. We found out that the mobile phone is the one portable object carried at all times,
by all respondents. We will now go into more detail about the findings in each interview.

Respondent A - Full Time College Student

The full-time college student we interviewed is in her late teens and relies heavily on her
phone. After purchasing her first phone 4 years ago, she has learned to be dependant on mobile
phones.
“I'd always take my mobile phone and purse with me everywhere.”
Respondent A purchased her latest phone one month ago as she lost her previous one. This
has happened a couple of times in the past. She finds her phone most useful for socialising and
time-keeping. Texting is most important for this user to contact her close friends. She sends
between 10-15 texts a day, since purchasing her phone she has sent 165 texts. This is a very
startling fact which we shall delve further into in the critical reflection. Calling is also important
making on average 3 phone calls a day, over the past month she has had almost 2 hours worth of
phone calls. Respondent A uses the mobile phone for the camera feature as well as mp3 and games
but these were not requirements when purchasing the phone. Communication was most important,
and then price was considered.
Respondent A claims to know no one who does not own a mobile phone and so can contact
anyone she wishes at anytime. She finds the phone freeing in this way as well. She does not have to
sit by the phone or wait for some one to get home to get into contact with them. Knowing the
person she is trying to contact has a mobile phone and can be reached at anytime and can reach her
is liberating. It is also comforting in insecure situations and emergencies. She finds it reassuring
when walking home alone.
“I feel much safer when I have my phone with me.”
When asked how Respondent A would feel if her phone were to be taken away from her for
a period of time she states “upset…and not in time for anything” as she uses the clock on her phone
instead of a watch In a month Respondent A spends between €30 and €40 on credit.

Respondent B - Business Male in 20’s

After interviewing the working male in his 20’s we learned some interesting details. Being a
business man he carries two mobile phones with him at all times. These are the only two items he
mentioned when asked what he carries with him at all times. He, Respondent B, is very dependant
on these for communicating with people and for people to get into contact with him.
“Two, one for business and one for my own use but the two get mixed up anyway.”
Respondent B's phones are used in their majority for communication reasons as he does not
have a great knowledge of the other uses of his phone other than a game and the basics of the
camera. When asked to check his call timers and message counter so to tally up how much use he
gets out of his phone he did not know how to do so. Respondent B purchased his first phone in
December 1999 but his reasons for having a phone have changed from a novelty to a necessity.
When purchasing a phone today he looks for the usability and communication before all other
criteria.
Daily use of the phone is a big part of Respondent B's life. The sending/receiving of texts
plays a huge part in his use, on his personal phone he could receive anywhere up to 100 on a weekly
basis, and on his business phone 60 during the day wouldn’t be unusual however the personal and
business phone are sometimes used in both contexts. Calls are also used a lot, making 25 phone
calls a day between both phones. Calling people is important to this user, as is receiving texts. He’s
not too worried about sending texts, only when trying to get in contact with big groups of people for
the same purpose (group texts on the internet).
“I use my web texts most days for keeping people up to date.”
Although Respondent B is dependant on his phone he finds it restricting and annoying,
especially when people are trying to contact him incessantly. He finds them “restricting” in this
way.
In general use he finds people texting whilst in conversation with him annoying but is honest
in saying that he does it to them as well.
“It's annoying, but I'm going to do it straight back to them anyway.”
He only knows one person who does not have a mobile phone and that is his grandmother.
This shows the broad spectrum that mobile phone users encompass.

Respondent C – Full-time working parent

The respondent told us that she has owned her current mobile phone for three years.
Moving onto the questions relating to amount of texts sent and received in the same period, we
found some starling information. We then proceeded to ask the respondent about her usage of both
voice-dialling and texting.
“I would definitely ring people more than I text. I've been told I'm a slow texter so it is just
easier for me to ring people.”
We then asked the respondent does she know anyone who doesn't own a mobile phone and
she answered that her mother of 83 did not own one. We asked her to explain why.
“She doesn't want one. I want her to have one for safety's sake but she just doesn't want one.
I suppose it would be hard for her to learn how to use it.”
When asked for what purposes does she mostly use her phone, out of the options of:
chatting, organising social activities, time-keeping and emergencies, respondent C answered
emergencies.
“I would mainly use it for important things, like ringing my younger children to see where
they are. I wouldn't use it for time-keeping when meeting friends as much. I often text my sister to
chat as she lives in Wales but not as much as I would ring other friends.”
When asked, on average, how many text messages respondent C would send in a day, she
answered:
“It differs, but on average, I'd say I would only send one a day. Some days I don't text at all.
Other days I would send about eight.”
“I would make about six calls in a day.”
Asking respondent C how she would use her mobile phone in the car, she admitted to not
using a hands-free set. This is obviously being practised by many other mobile phone users also.
When asked how would she feel if a friend began texting someone while in her presence, she told
us she would be “a little annoyed”. We asked respondent C would she ever leave the house without
her mobile phone and she answered:
“Never. I take it everywhere with me just in case.”
We asked “in case of what?” and she told us in case she was needed or she needed someone.
Quoting from Ling and Yttri's paper, we asked respondent C had she turned off her mobile
phone to participate in this interview and she told us that she had turned it 'on silent'. Quoting again
from the same paper, we asked respondent C would she agree with the statement that “It is not like
'hi, I'm doing fine' etc., it is something that we need.”. She agreed with this statement,which
displays her view of the mobile phone as a necessity rather than a social tool.
 CRITICAL REFLECTION

Analysing the data we have collected in our interviews, we have a number of points to
make. Firstly, we will deal with the similarities between each respondent's usage of the mobile
phone.
Obviously, all three respondents own a mobile phone. They each find it a very important
material possession, as it is the one thing each will not leave the home without. This depicts the
respondents' dependency on the mobile phone quite well. A number of years ago, it wouldn't have
been unusual to be without your mobile phone while out. Katz and Aakhus (perpetual, first chapter)
put across this point well.

People worldwide are more likely to own a telephone than the more celebrated 'miracle' of
communication technology, the TV. (Katz and Aakhus, 2002)

The popular brand name of Nokia is still a major provider of mobile handsets, which can be
drawn from our data. Two out of the three respondents interviewed admitted to owning a Nokia
handset. Meteor is the most popular service provider with, again, two out of three having contracts
with the company.
Life without the mobile phone would be unimaginable for many people today, not least
respondent A, who claims she would “be late for everything” if she had no mobile phone. The clock
on the home screen of the handset is obviously very important to her. However, that is not all that a
mobile is used for. Without a doubt, calls and texts are the most important activities which can be
carried out on a mobile phone. All three respondents named one or both of these most important
when using the phone. SMS (short message service) was developed as a side product and was
expected to remain overshadowed by mobile calls (Kasesniemi and Rautiainen, 2002). However,
the use of texting has, without a doubt, surpassed expectations, especially when taking teenagers'
use into account.

Text messaging, like TV and the internet, has established itself as part of the adolescents' everyday life as
a teenager. It is now common for teens to have more SMS messages than calls on their invoices
(Kasesniemi and Rautiainen, 2002)

An interesting point that we learned from the interviews is that two out of three of the
subject use bill pay method of paying for the usage of their phone. This method can have a big
impact on the users life depending on how much they spend bi-monthly. Receiving a bill at the end
of this time means that they don’t have to worry about running out of credit or travelling to the shop
if they do, this could happen if they had the ‘Pay As You Go’ scheme. Only the college student had
this scheme of payment. She can more readily purchase credit when she has the money as opposed
to receiving a bill at the end of two months of frequent phone usage and not being able to afford to
pay it.
When asked during the interview if their phone was on all three subjects responded with a
yes. The working mother received a text during the interview, read it but refrained from replying.
The businessman received a phone call during the interview and answered the call. Here, they were
all still available to a further social network while participating.
Our three subjects use their mobile phone for both business/college contacts and social
contacts. Only one subject had two separate mobile phones, one for business transactions and the
other for socialising. However he finds that the two phones get mixed up anyway, blurring the
boundaries between work and social life. This is well noted by Aoki and Downes in “An Analysis
of Young People’s Use Of and Attitudes Toward Cell Phones”. One has to wonder if there is
anyway to keep the two separate. Subject A uses her mobile phone for both college correspondents
and social correspondents, as does subject C who uses her mobile phone to contact her work
colleagues as well as her family and friends.
When asked about using their phone on a daily basis and what they use it for, the subjects
had different answers. The businessman uses his most for organising social activities around his
business life and social life, then socialising privately. He uses his phone least for emergencies. This
is opposite to the working mother who uses her phone most for emergencies, such as children
ringing for a lift or if they are lost, arranging activities is the second most likely aspect she would
use her phone for. The college student’s usage of the mobile phone differs from the businessman
and working mother. The subject uses her mobile phone mostly for socialising and time keeping,
even noting that if her phone were to be taken off her she would be late for everything. And
although having her mobile phone for emergency situations, “When walking alone at night, I feel
much safer [having the phone]”, it still comes to the bottom of the list in her daily usage.
The applications used most by the subjects are voice calls and texting; the working mother
uses voice calls more than texts. The businessman also makes voice calls more than texts but
prefers receiving text messages rather then phone calls which he considers annoying. The college
student finds texting most useful, sending up to fifteen texts a day as opposed to just three voice
calls a day.
We had given the subjects six options and to rate them in order of importance. Calls and
texts were most important, with the camera falling in third by all subjects. This is very interesting. It
shows the significance of other applications on a mobile phone. Although the main function of the
mobile phone to the three respondents is communication, other functions also come into play.
Games on phones are used also, for entertainment value but aren’t seen as important in comparison
with calls and the camera. These facts will influence the future technology of phones and their daily
usage with cameras and other functions. Overall however, our results coincide with Aoki and
Downes in “An Analysis of Young People’s Use Of and Attitudes Toward Cell Phones”, when the
authors noted that mobile phones are “used largely as communication devices.”
When using the phones as noted before SMS or texting is a popular form of communication,
although not as popular with the working mother, all three subjects use it quite often. Over one
month the college student sent 165 texts and the working mother sent 747 and received 2204, the
businessman did not know how to access this information on his phone but stated that personally,
he sends 100 texts a week, while through his business phone he sends about 60 a day. He uses the
free web texts supplied by his service provider to send this amount of SMS.

Messaging can be a way of maintaining ongoing background awareness of others,

and of keeping multiple channels of communication open.
(Ito M., Okabe D., 2003)

The subjects had views on the benefits of having a mobile phone with them at all times. The
businessman found being always contactable very restricting and “annoying” and yet will not leave
his house without his phones, during the interview he even noted that he wished he didn’t have a
mobile phone. This shows that although he has dislike for his mobile phones and he won’t rid of
them he has a strong dependency on them. The working mother also finds having a mobile phone
restricting in that she feels that it is essential to have when leaving the house. This is different to the
college student who finds it freeing not having to sit next to the landline phone when waiting for a
call. She finds it extremely useful to be contactable at all times.

As participants start using a cell phone regularly, it becomes part of their lives and they feel lost without
it.
(Aoki and Downes,2003)

During the day all subjects said they would readily answer their phone or text someone back
while socialising with a group of friend without a second thought, yet the business man and the
working mother both stated that they would be annoyed if someone in their social group did this
while in front of them. The college student however stated that this wouldn’t trouble her much.
They would all answer their phone in a social setting such as on a bus but not in a meeting or
lecture, only the businessman would check to see if the call is important enough to leave the
meeting for.
All subjects find the mobile phone the best form of communication. According to Rich Ling
“Nobody sits at home and waits for the telephone to ring.” our subjects thoroughly agreed with this
statement. The businessman doesn’t have a landline, the college student has only used her student
accommodation landline a couple of times to contact other people in the same student village as her
for free and rarely uses her home landline, while the working mother sometimes uses her landline
but finds her mobile phone gets the most usage.
 CONCLUSION

To conclude, we have found a number of facts about the social impact of the ICT, the
mobile telephone. The points stressed in the critical reflection accurately portray the influence that
mobile phone has on the population. The mobile phone is only going to get more popular, more
advanced and more effective. Mobiles, a maturing technology, are fast becoming ubiquitous.
Although they can be seen as a hindrance, as we discovered through our series of interviews, it is
true to say that many simply cannot live without the device in their lives. Even young teens and
children own mobile phones now, displaying the high penetration rate that mobile phones have.
This one aspect of ICT certainly has a high social impact.
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