Studies show that mobile phones encourage a more secure, connected and productive life

Numerous studies have shown that there is a strong link between mobile phones and economic growth. The theory here is that mobile phones encourage improved access to educational opportunities, health resources, business and employment opportunities. Another tie into this theory is that it will be more women accessing mobile phones that will encourage this economic growth. SocialEarth reports via @mobileactive.

Why? Studies have shown that mobile phones encourage a more secure, connected and productive life.

Security: Studies have shown that an overwhelming majority of women feel safer because of their mobile phones globally.

Connectedness: 85% of women report feeling more independent because of their mobile phones. With access to hospitals and other information for their daily lives, at the click of a button, women can be connected to the rest of the world from the most rural regions.

Productivity: From India to Senegal to Kosovo, women are beginning to realize that the power of mobile phones unlocks economic opportunities in their regions. According to one study regarding women’s opinions on mobile phones, more than half agree that mobile phones encourage additional income.

However, there are certainly hurdles to women owning mobile phones in developing countries. These hurdles include the costs of handsets and service, a lack of understanding as to why they need mobile phones, fear of not being able to learn how to use the technology, and cultural issues relating to the stigma of a women’s role.

Read full article.

Researchers want your text messages

An SFU rsrchr wants 2 know how u txt 2 get yr msg across. [via BurnabyNow]

If you can read that, you may want to take part in a study looking at the language of text messaging. Text4Science is a collaboration between researchers at Burnaby's SFU, the University of Montreal and the University of Ottawa, and they want people to donate their text messages to science.

We hope to see how text messages change with languages and dialects," said Christian Guilbault, an associate professor with SFU's French department.

Guilbault said the project's first phase found differences in texting depending on the type of French spoken, and now researchers want to see if the same thing is happening with English speakers.

"There are some differences between the French used in France and in Quebec, so we expect to see significant differences between different dialects in English," he said.

To get involved, forward your text message 202202 via cellphone (your regular charges apply). There's also an online survey to complete at www.text4science.

Read full article.

Studies reveal addictive nature of smartphone use

While addiction to apps or texting is not a recognized medical condition, there have been numerous studies produced on whether the technology causes more harm than good. The Vancouver Sun reports.

A study by Case Western Reserve School of Medicine found that teens who spend a lot of time on texting or on social media are also more like to use drugs or alcohol and get into fights.

.. Smartphones also can be habit-forming, according to a study by Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and Intel Labs. Researchers found that smartphone users in the U.S. and in Finland checked their phone repeatedly throughout the day, usually for less than 30 seconds.

Read full article.

Study shows texting makes for easier lying

Text messaging leads people to be more deceitful when compared to other modes of communication, according to Sauder School of Business researchers at the University of British Columbia. Andrew Riley reports.

Their study compares the level of deceit people are prepared to use in a variety of media, from text messages to face-to-face interactions.

“People are communicating using a growing range of methods, from Twitter to Skype,” says Sauder Assoc. Prof. Ronald Cenfetelli, a co-author on the paper. “As new platforms of communication come online, it’s important to know the risks that may be involved.”

"Our results confirm that the more anonymous the technology allows a person to be in a communications exchange, the more likely they are to become morally lax,” says Sauder Prof. Karl Aquino, also one of the co-authors.

The study involved 170 students performing mock stock transactions in one of four ways: face-to-face, or by video, audio or text chatting. Researchers promised cash awards of up to $50 to increase participants’ involvement in the role play. “Brokers” were promised increased cash rewards for more stock sales, while “buyers” were told their cash reward would depend on the yet-to-be-determined value of the stock.

The brokers were given inside knowledge that the stock was rigged to lose half of its value. Buyers were only informed of this fact after the mock sales transaction and were asked to report whether the brokers had employed deceit to sell their stock.

The authors then analyzed which forms of communication led to more deception. They found that buyers who received information via text messages were 95 per cent more likely to report deception than if they had interacted via video, 31 per cent more likely to report deception when compared to face-to-face, and 18 per cent more likely if the interaction was via audio chat.

Their results suggest that communicating by video heightened the brokers’ awareness of being scrutinized, which suppressed their impulse to use dishonest sales tactics – the so-called “spotlight” effect.

“With this in mind, people shopping online using websites like eBay should consider asking sellers to talk over Skype to ensure they are getting information in the most trustworthy way possible,” says Cenfetelli, who studies human-computer interaction in Sauder’s Management Information Systems division.

The study also reveals that people deceived by “leaner” media, such as text messages are more angered than those misled by “richer” media, such as video chat.

The lesson for business, says Cenfetelli, is that video conferencing or in-person interactions may be preferable to text-based communication if the company is concerned about how customers may react to the given information.

For further information contact
Andrew Riley
Manager, Public and Media Relations Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia
E-mail: Andrew Riley

Teenagers today would rather have a smartphone than a car

Smartphones, along with social networks and text messaging, have become the expression of liberation from parents that getting a driver’s license and hitting the open road once was. Bits reports.

In a survey to be published later this year, Gartner found that 46 percent of people 18 to 24 would choose access to the Internet over access to their own car. Only 15 percent of the baby boom generation would say that, the survey found. “The iPhone is the Ford Mustang of today,” Thilo Koslowski, lead automotive analyst for Gartner said.

Sheryl Connelly of Ford has an interesting explanation for the behavioral shift. Driving a car limits the valuable time teenagers could use to text-message with their friends or update their social networks, she said. Although public transportation or waiting for a ride from the parents is slower, it gives a teenager more time to engage with friends on a mobile phone.

Read full article.

Texting our way to isolation

Sherry Turkle — clinical psychologist and professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self —urges a refocus on human interaction. The Chicago Tribune reports.

... Turkle's fear is that the suggestion of emotional intimacy supplied by our ever-ready, ever-present devices is becoming, for too many, an acceptable or even preferred substitute for the real thing.

The constant contact provided by our cell phones gives, she said, "the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship." And she described people, younger and older alike, who said they would "rather text than talk."

... Turkle bases her thinking this not just on ivory-tower theorizing, but on field research, on watching families fail to interact with one another, on seeing people in nature looking not at the dunes or the ocean, but at their BlackBerries.

Read full article.

Study finds link between children's use of SMS and improved literacy.

New research has found a strong link between primary school children's use of text abbreviations and improved literacy, reports stuff.

University of Tasmania psychologist Dr Nenagh Kemp and honours student Catherine Bushnell conducted a study of about 90 children aged 10 to 12 from three middle-class primary schools. The researchers looked at whether taking such linguistic shortcuts was affecting the students' literacy skills.

The results, recently published in the US Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, were surprising. They showed the use of textisms is driving the development of literacy skills and could be improving language and literacy learning.

Read more.

Links to related studies pro and con.

Sleep with your iPhone? You're not alone

The Daily Herald on our attachment to cell phones.

... Michelle Hackman, a recent high school graduate in Long Island, N.Y., won a $75,000 prize in this year's Intel Science Talent Search with a research project investigating teens' attachment to their cell phones. She found that students separated from their phones were under-stimulated -- a low heart rate was an indicator -- and lacked the ability to entertain themselves.

Most of the teens at Hackman's affluent high school own smartphones, she says, and could even be found texting under their desks during class. "It creates an on-edge feeling and you don't realize how much of the lecture you're missing," Hackman says.

For some, the anxious feeling that they might miss something has caused them to slumber next to their smartphones. More than a third of U.S. adults -- 35 percent -- now own a smartphone, according to the Pew Research Center, and two-thirds of them sleep with their phones right next to their beds.

Read full article. Image from Sleep Apnea Disorder.

The Butler Lie: lies that politely terminate e-conversations

Many believe it is easier to lie by text than by phone or in person, but emerging research indicates that’s not necessarily true. The New York Times reports.

We’ve always lied; new technologies are merely changing the ways and the reasons we lie. Witness the “butler lie,” a term coined by Cornell University researchers in 2009 to describe lies that politely initiate and terminate instant messaging conversations. (“Gotta go, boss is coming!”) Like butlers, they act as social buffers, telling others that we are at lunch when we are just avoiding them.

Being constantly reachable makes butler lies necessary to many people, and the Cornell researchers concluded in a subsequent study that ambiguities inherent in traditional texting also made them easier. Texters typically do not know when outgoing messages are read, where their recipients are or what they are doing.

Of 5,396 texts examined, 10.7 percent were deceptive. Of those, 30 percent were butler lies, compared with less than 20 percent of lies by instant message.

Read full article.

What Cellphone Calls Say About Parent-Teenager Relations

Researchers are starting to zero in on how cellphone use affects the dynamic of the parent-child relationship. A paper published online on Monday in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking suggests that both the nature of the calls and who initiates the calls may affect relations. The New York Times reports.

Abstract:

-- Parents’ ability to parent their adolescents may be extended by using a cell phone. At the same time, using the cell phone, adolescents can seek out parental interaction.

-- Parents reported greater communication and closeness when adolescents initiated calls seeking social support.

-- Adolescents reported greater conflict when parents called for monitoring activity, for tracking schoolwork, and when upset.

-- Calls to ask and confer by adolescents and to track school work positively related, but parental calls when upset negatively related to parental self-esteem. Adolescent self-esteem is predicted by calls seeking support and negatively associated with parents calling when upset.

Read more.

Social Networks Distract at Work. Seriously

The proliferation of collaboration and social tools designed to increase productivity is actually costing businesses millions of dollars per year in lost productivity, according to a survey of more than 500 employees in U.S. businesses of all sizes conducted by online market research firm uSamp and commissioned by social email software provider harmon.ie.

Nearly 60% of work interruptions now involve either using tools like email, social networks, text messaging and IM, or switching windows among disparate standalone tools and applications.

In fact, 45% of employees work only 15 minutes or less without getting interrupted, and 53% waste at least one hour a day due to all types of distractions.

That hour per day translates into $10,375 of wasted productivity per person annually, assuming an average salary of $30/hour.

That is more than the average U.S. driver will spend this year to own and maintain a car. For businesses with 1,000 employees, the cost of employee interruptions exceeds $10 million per year.

Full press release via PC World.

Surprise: Cellphones Make People More Social with Strangers

Well well well, a study that has something nice to say about cell phones for a change. Reported by TechNews Daily.

Apparently, reading the news on a mobile device while waiting in line at a coffee shop may seem like ou'rere cutting yourself off from the people around you, but a new study from the University of Michigan suggests the opposite: The more people use their phones in public to stay up on news, the more likely they are to talk to strangers in those settings.

The study, which was featured in the current issue of the international journal Human Communication Research, also found that people using their cellphones to make plans are also likely to participate in public conversations.

Study: Mobile Communication and Civil Society: Linking Patterns and Places of Use to Engagement with Others in Public - Scott W. Campbell, Nojin Kwak. Published in Human Communication Research.

How mobile phones are turning into phantom limbs

The Telegraph on how our dependence on cell phones can be compared to "phantom limb syndrome" - the syndrome suffered by many amputees, who feel strange and often painful sensations coming from their missing limbs.

... Recent experiments have shown how we can identify other people’s limbs and even inanimate objects as being part of our body. For the most part this only happens in specialised situations, but there are tools that we use so often that we could consider them to be parts of ourselves – none more that mobile phones.

Read full article.

Forget tweets, all we want to do is text, says study

The latest mobile phones may allow you ‘tweet’, ‘poke’ and ‘check-in’, but all most people want to do is text. The Telegraph reports.

Mobile technology evangelists have been predicting the death of the humble text message for a decade, but a new study by Deloitte has found texts are still very much alive and kicking.

Deloitte found that 90pc of smartphone owners send at least one text message a day, compared to four in 10 who access social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, on their phones. Half of British adults access emails on their phones.

More than three out of 10 of those aged between 18 and 24 send at least one text message every hour. It is thought that children and teenagers, who were not included in the study, send an even greater number of texts.

Read full article.

emily | 6:33 PM | permalink

Tweet

Cellphones helping minorities close gap on Internet access?

Blacks and Hispanics seem more likely than whites to use cellphones instead of home computers to get Internet access, a new report finds. Can that help them narrow the digital divide? The Christian Science Monitor reports.

That finding, in a a new report by the Pew Hispanic Center, by no means implies parity has been reached. Fewer Hispanics and blacks than whites went online last year or owned a cellphone. Two-thirds of adult Hispanics and black Americans went online in 2010 compared with 77 percent percent of white adults. And 76 percent of Hispanics and 79 percent of blacks owned a mobile phone, compared with 85 percent of whites.

Read full article.

Previously:

-- For minorities, new "digitale divide" seen - Today, as mobile technology puts computers in our pockets, Latinos and blacks are more likely than the general population to access the Web by cellular phones, and they use their phones more often to do more things.

-- Mobile Internet Use Shrinks Digital Divide in The US - A survey, conducted in April 2009 by interviewing 2,253 Americans, found that while accessing the Internet via a mobile phone was increasing, the swell was reflected most sharply among African-Americans.

Text messaging 'improves children's spelling skills'

Mobile phone text messaging can boost children’s spelling skills, according to (yet another) new study. The Telegraph reports.

Academics from UK's Coventry University said there was “no evidence” that access to mobile phones harmed children’s literacy skills and could even have a positive impact on spelling.

... The research, to be published in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning next month, found evidence of a “significant contribution of textism use to the children’s spelling development during the study”.

Read full article.

Links to postive studies on the effect of text messaging on student's writing skills:

-- Study: Is texting valuable or vandalism?

-- RU Kidding - "txtspeak" Has No Impact on Children's Spelling Ability

-- Texting can b gd 4 ur kids

-- Texts 'do not hinder literacy'

-- Texting teenagers are proving 'more literate than ever before'

-- E-Mail and Texting - Not at all bad

-- Texting 'is no bar to literacy'

-- Teacher finds novel way to use texting

Links to negative studies:

-- Text messages harm written language? (Oh-Hum)

-- Technology marches ahead, grammar gets worse

-- Y TEXTING MAYBE BAD 4 U

-- SMS Resulting in Poor English Grades?

-- SMS and Internet blamed for decline in English Examinations

-- SMS threatens Norwegian language say teachers

-- Teachers hung up on SMS

-- An essay written in text message shorthand

The lonely crowd

In her new book, Alone Together, published this month by Basic Books, Sherry Turkle suggests that the time is ripe for widespread rethinking of the way we use cutting-edge technology. [via MIT News]

There is a real state of confusion about whether or not we have each other's attention in our always-on connectivity culture," says Sherry Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, in MIT's Program in Science, Technology and Society. "Families fight over this issue. It's time for a correction, because we still have a chance to change things.

Alone Together documents extensive field surveys made by Turkle, a psychologist who interviewed 450 subjects to understand how people adopt technology in everyday life. One of the book’s most striking findings is that many families play out a kind of role reversal over technology: Young people, while admittedly heavy users of mobile devices themselves, are nonetheless unhappy at the frequent use of mobile devices by their parents. Many high-school-age kids complained to Turkle of parents who enter the “BlackBerry zone” and ignore them even during family meals. “My parents text while we eat. I’m used to it,” one teen told Turkle.

Turkle is at pains to make clear that her view about the impact of technology on contemporary life is not all negative. “Of course I found many positive things about the always-on culture,” she says. “People have opportunities to create friendships and stay in contact with other people from all over the world. None of what I found negates that.”

Read more.

Bedtime Buying on the Rise As Brits Snatch Time to Shop from Their Mobiles

With less than two weeks to go until Christmas, the latest insight from Orange customers reveals a new breed of shoppers avoiding the festive rush by shopping from their mobile phones, at night.

-- One in five (18%) admit to a spot of bedtime buying.

-- Almost a third (31%) multitask and shop for presents whilst also watching TV.

-- Saturday night's now alright for shopping according to the survey with it ranked the top day of the week for mobile shopping.

--13% admit to shopping for presents from their mobile in secret whilst at work.

Read full report in Cellular-News.

US Consumers Embrace Text Messaging

American consumers are now using text messaging to accomplish a range of tasks that go beyond simply communicating with other individuals, according to a survey by Thomas/Ferrous. Cellular News reports.

More than 55% of a national sample of adults have either sent or received text messages regarding a product, business or organization. That percentage increases to 68% for those under the age of 45.

Read more.

Japanese prefer mobile e-mail over text messaging

According to a survey by research group comScore’s MobiLens, only 40% of Japanese send text messages, while two-thirds of Americans and 82% of Europeans engage in short message service, or SMS. Why is this?

The Japanese just prefer to send emails. The report says 54% of Japanese send emails from their phones, compared with 28% of Americans and 19% of Europeans.

Read full article in The Wall Street Journal.

Texting is writing, researcher says

The days of traditional college writing instruction are nearly over, contends a Michigan State University researcher who found that college students now rank texting as the No. 1 form of writing and cell phones as a top writing platform. Michigan State University reports.

Lead researcher Jeff Grabill, professor of writing and rhetoric, studied the writing behaviors of more than 1,300 first-year college students across the nation from a variety of institutions and locations from April to June.

Texting is indeed writing, students said, and they value their texts more than any other writing style – even above social networking status updates and comments.

People may argue texting is bad writing, but it’s writing many people do every day, said Grabill, co-director of MSU’s Writing in Digital Environments Research Center.

Contrary to the popular belief that “kids these days don’t write,” college students lead complex writing lives and write more than any other generation, he said.

Other key findings:

-- E-mail is for “old people.” Students use it primarily to communicate with professors and parents, and while they do it frequently they don’t value it highly.

-- Students prefer to write alone rather than collaborate with classmates.

-- Most writing on Facebook is related to interpersonal messaging. Students more often comment on posts and status updates of friends than post things to their own profiles. They also report using Facebook for writing everything from lists to screenplays to poetry.

Read full article.

Links to articles related to postive and negative studies on the effect of text messaging on student's writing skills.

Adults, Cell Phones and Texting

PewResearchCenter on adults, cell phones and texting:

Texting by adults has increased over the past nine months from 65% of adults sending and receiving texts in September 2009 to 72% texting in May 2010.

Adults who text typically send and receive a median of 10 texts a day; teens who text send and receive a median of 50 texts per day.

5% of all adult texters send more than 200 text messages a day or more than 6,000 texts a month.

Heavy adult texters -- those who send and receive more than 50 texts a day -- also tend to be heavy users of voice calling.

Read more.

15%of consumers have made purchase with mobile device

An independent survey, which examined consumer preferences and attitudes surrounding mobile shopping, found that 15 percent of consumers have used their mobile devices to make purchases. Mobile Commerce Daily reports.

The age demographic with the highest usage was 25-34 with 21 percent of them making a purchase from their mobile phone.

Not surprisingly this is also the same demographic that had the highest percentage of smartphones,” he said. “The speed of mobile networks, screen resolutions and overall usability of the phones are increasing the growth of mobile shopping.”

This online survey was conducted by SmartRevenue in June/July 2010 and surveyed 3,611 male and female consumers ages 18 and older living in the United States.

Read full article.

Texting generation doesn't share boomers' taste for talk

According to research by Nielsen, nearly all age groups are spending less time talking on the phone, reports The Washington Post.

Boomers in their mid-50s and early 60s are the only ones still talking.

The fall of the call is driven by 18- to 34-year-olds, whose average monthly voice minutes have plunged from about 1,200 to 900 in the past two years, according to research by Nielsen.

Texting among 18- to 24-year-olds has more than doubled in the same period, from an average of 600 messages a month two years ago to more than 1,400 texts a month, according to Nielsen.

Young people say they avoid voice calls because the immediacy of a phone call strips them of the control that they have over the arguably less-intimate pleasures of texting, e-mailing, Facebooking or tweeting. They even complain that phone calls are by their nature impolite, more of an interruption than the blip of an arriving text.

Read full article. Image from forsisterbysister.

The Risks of Parenting While Plugged In

A insightful piece in The New York Times that all parents should read. On how technology distracts us from our children.

..."It sort of comes back to quality time, and distracted time is not high-quality time, whether parents are checking the newspaper or their BlackBerry,” said Frederick J. Zimmerman, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Public Health who has studied how television can distract parents. He also noted that smartphones and laptops may enable some parents to spend more time at home, which may, in turn, result in more, rather than less, quality time overall.

Read full article

Stanford Students Reveal Intimate Connection With Mobile Phones

In a Stanford University graduate course, Tanya Luhrmann teaches anthropological research methods. A recent project included observation, focus groups, and interviews around on-campus mobile phone use; the insights reveal how technology is changing the way we live. Mobile Behavior reports.

The iPhone is an identity. People spoke about their phone as if it were part of their body, and even more a part of their mind, with a weird entanglement of Big Brother anxieties over security — "If someone stole my phone, they could just get in everywhere and retrace my steps everywhere" — and an emotional sense that their phone was who they were. Some people said that without their phone they felt disconnected from the world around them, fuzzy-headed, helpless and incompetent ("I would feel lost without it").

Read full article. [via Salon]

Children 'more likely to own a mobile phone than a book'

Children as young as seven are more likely to own a mobile phone than a book, figures show, fuelling fears over a decline in reading, reports The Telegraph.

... As part of the latest study, the National Literacy Trust surveyed more than 17,000 schoolchildren aged seven to 16.

It found that 85.5 per cent of pupils had their own mobile phone, compared with 72.6 per cent who had their own books. Among children in Key Stage 2 – aged seven to 11 – 79.1 per cent had a mobile compared with 72.7 per cent who had access to books.

The findings come amid continuing concerns over the effect of modern technology on young people.

Read full article. Link to National Literacy Trust study.

Why are cellphones so annoying?

Ever wonder why overhearing a cellphone conversation is so annoying? American researchers think they have found the answer, reports stuff.

Whether it is the office, on a train or in a car, only half of the conversation is overheard which drains more attention and concentration than when overhearing two people talking, according to scientists at Cornell University.

Which shows you can do a study about just anything.

Sending a Message That You Don’t Care

Christine Pearson explains her research over more than a decade on text messaging and how it's damaging workplace relationships. In The New York Times.

Excerpts.

For more than a decade, my colleagues and I have gathered data on incivility from more than 9,000 managers and workers across the United States, and we’re continuing this work internationally. We have learned a great deal about the problem’s causes and consequences.

Electronic devices lead to more incivility because of their powerful ability to claim our attention — no matter where we are or what we’re doing.

... Through our devices, we find a way to disappear without leaving the room. By splitting ourselves off and reaching out electronically, we fill empty interpersonal space and ignite our senses. We can find relief and a fleeting sense of freedom.

Count how many times this happens each day, and you begin to understand the cumulative effect of electronic incivility in the workplace.

In my research, I’ve learned that when employees behave in an uncivil way, their colleagues may take retribution. They might withhold information — for example, by “forgetting” to include the offender’s name on a final product. Or they might see to it that he or she ends up with a less desirable task next time. Or they might even refuse to work with the person again.

Read full article. Image from Bow Tie's Law Blog.

Mother's phone call 'can be as soothing as a hug'

A mother's voice on the phone can soothe a stressed child just as much as a hug, a study of young girls suggests, reports the BBC.

US researchers put more than 60 girls in a stressful situation and monitored their hormonal responses when they were either phoned or hugged afterwards.

Their mother's voice produced virtually the same amount of the stress-quelling hormone oxytocin as physical comfort.

The findings appear in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Read full article.