by Alan Bonnici

Created on: March 30, 2010

Someone once said, “Technology does not drive change - it enables change.” Applied to the question of whether cell phones draw us together or push us apart, the correct answer would be that it depends on the individual. I’ve lived in a number of different places ranging from New York City all the way to a rural little village in the south of Sicily (nearest neighbor 20 minutes walking distance) and I feel that the connections I made and retained did not depend on the gadgetry available but on me. Having established that the focus should be on the me and not on the it, the simple answer to the question being posed is that cell phones are devices that do keep us connected; much more connected than we could possibly be without them.

Before the cell phone era, a phone was a family device, belonging to the family but owned by no one in particular. Sure, some family members hogged the lines more than others, but ultimately no one could claim ownership per se. The cell phone changed all of that. Today a cell phone knows only one master and is customized for the needs of that person. The phone accompanies its owner everywhere and has become an extension of its owner. For those people who liked to keep in touch with others the cell phone proved to be the ideal device. Suffice to say that in 2008 over 75 billion SMS text messages were send each month in the USA (source: http://www.cellsigns.com/industry.shtml).  The median age of SMS message users in the US is 38 years. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in 2008, the number of worldwide mobile subscribers reached 4 billion. This is 61% of the world population.  And what about the number of minutes people spend talking on their phone? If this isn’t all about being connected than what is?

The above describes the two most basic operations of every cell phone. Many phones today provide additional functions that allow their owner to communicate using other routes. Thanks to wireless Internet connectivity, provided either by the carrier or because the phone as WI-FI capabilities built in, their owners can install programs that allow them to use social networking and chat programs such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Skype, MSN and others from within their phone.

Whenever a family member, a friend or colleague needs to communicate we normally use one of the methods described in this article. Learning how to use a particular feature becomes easy especially since one has the necessary drive to want to use it and has the support of those with whom it is to be initially used with. The fact that cell phones support a multitude of different technologies and these technologies are standard across different brands and different products also contributes to make this a device of choice for anything related to communication. An email sent from a mobile phone is readable by a person sitting at his desktop computer and a call made from a Nokia in Afghanistan can be received without problems by a person owning an iPhone in Zimbabwe. The only issue is whether these two individuals want to communicate with one another.

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