Information Society 1 Project

CS4003 INFORMATION SOCIETY 1 The impact of new ICTs on everyday life 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 “breathtaking 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 sixweek 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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