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For Some Teenagers, Cell Phones Become 'an Extension of Me'

Posted on: Friday, 7 October 2005, 18:00 CDT

By Dawn C. Chmielewski, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

Oct. 7--What happens when a group of teens and tweens are asked to surrender their cell phones for a day?

Nothing as dramatic as, say, a wild animal caught in a steel trap. No limbs were gnawed off in this experiment. But the intensity of the response among the 33 kids who took part in the No Phone Day exercise reveals that this wireless generation is so dependent on its mobile phones that doing without one, even for 24 hours, was tantamount to sacrificing an appendage.

"That was the hardest day of my life," wrote 10-year-old Pinky from Deltona, Fla. "I felt like I was missing my arm. I never want to do that again. Please do not ask me to do that again."

Of course, a teen's love affair with the phone is as old as Archie Comics and rotary dials.

The weeklong teen cell phone study, conducted by KDA Research of San Francisco for the Consumer Electronics Association, reaffirms that this long-acknowledged teen phone infatuation continues. What's striking about the results is the degree to which the gadgets are integrated into kids' lives -- how young they are when they develop the cell phone-grafted-to-the-ear habit.

It reminds me of the tobacco industry: Get 'em when they're young, and they're hooked for life.

The question of when (or whether) to purchase a cell phone for a child is a major point of contention among our friends and their offspring. One friend, Mari, is constantly battling with her 13-year-old daughter who has tried, unsuccessfully, to prey on her mom's fears. What if there's an emergency? How can I reach you?

That's when Mari turns that old teen chestnut -- all my friends have one -- on its ear. You can always use a friend's phone to call.

This KDA Research study, conducted on behalf of the gadget pushers, perversely makes the case for my friend's anachronistic insistence on cell phone abstinence in an age when 70 percent of all 13 and 14-year-olds do have cell phones. Cell phone ownership approaches 90 percent among high school seniors.

Kicking the wireless habit -- even for a day -- made the participants feel vulnerable, bored, disconnected, naked. Just like cell-phone-wedded, constantly connected adults.

In online diaries, they recounted how they would reach for the phone and dial before remembering it was verboten. The extent of their dependency on their mobile phone surprised even some of the kids, "My phone is an extension of me," wrote Kwengca, a 13-year-old boy from San Jose. "I don't think I can live without it."

One 12-year-old boy from Paradis, La., wrote a six-stanza ode to his mobile companion: "Silence may be golden/ yet -- I am beholden/ to my phone. No text/ What a mess/ I'm all alone, missing my phone."

The study reaffirmed my nagging sense that the cell phone is part of an electronic chrysalis hardening around my own 13-year-old son, isolating him from me.

Voice and text messages on the cell phone -- like their computer counterparts, instant messages or e-mail -- give the impression of being constantly connected with friends or family. But somehow, these kids seem oddly detached from the outside world.

When forced to surrender her cell phone for the day, Nikki, a 17-year-old honor student from Eatontown, N.J., and an industrial-strength mobile phone user, found her social routine disrupted.

"We had this stupid assembly and I couldn't find my friends . . . so I wound up sitting with someone I didn't really like," she wrote in her online journal. "I had to actually take time out to physically communicate with them."

Kids turn to text messages when regular phone conversations would be ill-mannered or disruptive. Text messages are considered a background activity, something to do while doing something else.

"Let's say I'm in the car with my mom," posted Angel, a 16-year-old from Nescopeck, Pa. "I text people because I find it to be kind of rude just to have a conversation without her."

But isn't that what she's doing? Tuning out?

Ten-year-old Shelby, a fourth grader from St. Louis, Mo., offers a frank appraisal of the value of text messages: They prevent parental eavesdropping.

"I usually text when my parents are around or (I'm) out where I don't want someone to hear me . . . like my grandma."

How can a communications tool leave us so alone?

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Copyright (c) 2005, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: San Jose Mercury News

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