August 10, 2004
Cigarettes and Cell Phones
The San Francisco Gate has an article on the inexhaustible subject of cell phone rudeness - and compares it to cigarette smoking.
"In fact, cell phones are becoming the cigarettes of our day". "I don't care if someone wants to smoke, but I don't want to breathe your smoke," Larry Magid, a Bay Area syndicated technology columnist, says. "In the same way, I don't care if you want to yell at your boyfriend, but I don't want to be brought into it."
Interesting, this is not the first time cigarettes and cell phones have been compared. In November 2000, a report from the British Medical Journal, claimed that teenagers were slowly replacing cigarette smoking with an equally addictive obsession, the mobile phone.
Among some of the reports findings:
-- A rise in mobile phone use during the late 1990s coincided with a decline in smoking among 15-year-olds.
-- The prevalence of smoking fell to 23% in 1999 from 30% in 1996, the same year mobile phone use skyrocketed among 15- to 17-year-olds
"We hypothesise that the fall in youth smoking and the rise in ownership of mobile phones among adolescents are related," the authors write. They suggest that many teens cannot afford to sustain both habits and prefer the cutting-edge technology over the smoking.
They also note that the device is associated with many of the traits that attract teens to cigarettes:
-- a sense of individuality and sociability
-- a desire to rebel
-- the need to bond with friends, the team notes
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