Last week, an article by the New York Times News Service reported how young people are using cell phones to make fake phone calls.
By faking phone calls and talking to ourselves, we send a message to people around us who are listening to our “personal”? call.
How widespread are fictitious calls? We don’t know yet, but in one survey, a professor of communication at Rutgers University asked his students how many of them faked phone calls. In one class, a quarter of the students said they did, and in another class, 27 of 29 students said they made up calls.
The article went on to interview young people why they fake calls.
Self-defense, one young woman said. She was being followed by a group of men in a New York subway, so she pretended she was talking to her boyfriend on the phone, and the men stopped following her.
Other young women interviewed said they made fake phone calls to fictitious boyfriends to avoid saying “No,”? to guys that are “hitting”? on them. Does that mean cell phones are growing into a dating tool to announce that we are “unavailable?”?
Others, the article went on to say, fake cell phone calls simply to avoid talking to people they would rather not deal with. As a ” leave me alone”? tool, young people begin a fake call when the undesirable person approaches. The saddest reason the article reported on was when young people make phone calls to themselves because it makes them feel that they belong. Being on the phone is a way to show others that they have friends.
How ironic that is. Here the cell phone is a little piece of technology designed to make instant communication available to people regardless of place and time and it’s used to communicate to those people standing nearby us.
Making up calls is obviously meeting the needs of people who feel socially isolated in our culture. It’s also serving the needs of people who want to be psychologically removed from those around them.
To read the article:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050421/30.html
(Cultural Buzz is a weekly column on cultural trends and differences in the U.S. and around the world. Feedback is always welcome. Simply write to contact@culturelinkpress.com)
Thank you for this insightful article on the unintended applications of a pervasive modern technology.
Looks very isolated to me. Just like television. You don’t really talk to a friend while watching. Everyone stares blandly. Seems just as antisocial as fake cell phone calls. Being afraid of actually talking to and facing a human being. The cell phone makes it conveniently easy to hide facial expressions. With a television there is barely any interaction at all. Besides a person reacting emotionally to the audience sound samples.