Contents:
The Impacts of Mobile Phone Use. Zheng Yan, , accessed December 17, Encyclopedia of Mobile Phone Behavior.
Abstract From being a simple communication technology to a key social tool, the mobile phone has become such an important aspect of people's everyday life. Mobile phones have altered the way people live, communicate, interact, and connect with others. Mobile phones are also transforming how people access and use information and media.
Given the rapid pervasiveness of mobile phones in society across the world, it is important to explore how mobile phones have affected the way people communicate and interact with others, access the information, and use media, and their daily lifestyle. This article aims to explore the social and cultural implications that have come with the ubiquity, unprecedented connectivity, and advances of mobile phones. In parts of India and Africa, there is also a culture of split-second calls known as "flashing" or "beeping. A person calls a mobile telephone number and then hangs up before the mobile's owner can pick up the call.
The mobile owner can then phone them back, thus picking up the tab for the call. Donner first came across "beeping" in Rwanda and tracked it's use across Africa.
He said the practice has many different meanings from "Come and pick me up", to "Hi", to "I'm thinking of you" to "Call me back. Seven ways mobile phones have changed Africa. As blogger Shashank Bengali writes: When your mechanic wants to tell you your car is ready, for example, he can flash you -- it's your car, after all, and if you want it back, you'd better call him.
He sounds a note of warning though: Read more from Our Mobile Society. In India it is common for people to take calls inside a movie theater. People don't know if the call is important so they pick up, Umang Shah, of PhiMetrics, a telecom audit and consulting firm in India, says. Like in Spain, few Indians have or use voicemail, he added.
Another quirk about India is that the caller may get to hear a Bollywood song, chosen by the subscriber instead of a ringing tone. Known as caller tunes, the subscriber is charged for this monthly and according to Shah, they are a big money-spinner. This is also common in parts of Africa where a caller might hear a quote from the Bible.
In both continents, it is also common for people to take calls inside a movie theater.
Anthony's College, Oxford, says. This is why phone use in cinemas and crowded trains, is tolerated, he adds. The only places they don't are the mosque or the church," Abdullahi Arabo, BT research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, explains. In Japanese movie halls, on the contrary, year-old Tokyo housewife Kanako Shibamoto says "we are not allowed to even put phones into silent mode because the light of the screen might make other people annoyed. Mobile manufacturers have also created double sim card handsets for the emerging markets so they can simultaneously benefit from the best data and voice deals.
In general, Indians chat for an average of minutes a month, benefiting from extremely low rates of 0.
Multiple sim ownership is common across Asia, Africa and Latin America. Graphics improved as handsets became more powerful, as demonstrated by the mobile version of Ridge Racer in , though such titles typically cost twice as much as other mobile games. Ridge Racer was published by Namco , one of the most successful mobile game publishers at the time.
That same year, Namco also released a fighting game that uses camera phone technology to create a player character based on the player's profile, and interprets the image to determine the character's speed and power; the character can then be sent to a friend's mobile to battle. Namco began attempting to introduce mobile gaming to Europe in Other mobile games released in included a Tamagotchi -like virtual pet game by Panasonic where the pet can be fed with photos of foods taken with a camera phone.
Another virtual pet game utilized a fingerprint scanner built into a handset to interact with a pet. Another mobile game that year was an educational game that utilized a mobile's microphone to help children with their pronunciation skills.
Japan is the world's largest market for mobile games. Phone decorations are common, notably mobile phone charms and various stickers. The stickers are often in the maki-e style, and are advertised as such.
I think the difference is that we generally consider mobile phones to be benevolent, rather than malevolent, because we believe we can control who we watch, when, where, etc. He also wants to improve development in underserved regions in India through education, networking for entrepreneurs, and even using mobile technologies to invent assistive prosthetic devices for people with physical disabilities. Cell phones today are used by all people in all cultures all over the world. Furthermore, we tend to make the world our place for private conversations, venturing out into public and having loud discussions that would have made my grandmother blush — alas, the death of the phone booth. A person calls a mobile telephone number and then hangs up before the mobile's owner can pick up the call.
Paging devices used in the late s to early s predate mobile phones and paved the way for the popularity of the phones among teenagers. Pagers could only display numbers and were intended to alert the owner that they had received a call from a certain phone number, but teens quickly began using numeric messages to communicate many things, including greetings and everyday emotions. Most were based on various ways numbers could be read in Japanese.
With the rapidly falling prices of cell phones in the mid s, young people began experimenting with the short message service that the mobile phone companies started offering. When the i-mode service became available, the mobile phone culture began flourishing in earnest as this service offered an E-mail application. Magazines and television regularly make specials focusing on the current trend of how mobile phones are used by young people.
There is a popular trend in Japan to use the mobile phone handset to read information from special barcodes. The current technology is based on ' QR codes ' which are a form of 2D barcode that is written out in a square shape instead of a bar shape.
The phone handset can scan the QR code using its camera or other input, decode the information, and then take actions based on the type of content. The most popular usage of these QR codes is in advertising. The QR code usually has links to a web site address or email address that the phone can access, or it might contain address and telephone numbers.
This technology makes use of an RFID chip inside the handset that can communicate with reading devices when the phone is placed near them. Though the technology is relatively new, there are many locations such as convenience stores which allow users to pay for goods using their phones; some vending machines even accept phone payments.
Users must 'charge up' their accounts with credits before they can pay using their phones. The Ubiquitous Business Department of NTT DoCoMo is developing the technology for a mobile phone to be the purchase system for virtual shops and smart shops, an authentication system in the medical field, and the purchase point for street poster advertisements. Gracenote and Media Socket have a service where the user can hold the phone up to a source of music such as a speaker , and, by dialing a certain phone number, find the song in a database and have it identified.
The user receives the song's title, artist, and album within seconds. This information can in turn be used to search the mobile Internet to find that song. Many of these technologies are now common place throughout the world thanks to the rise of smartphones, such as Android and iOS devices. It is considered a violation of good etiquette to answer a cell phone in certain public places.
For example, on trains it is rude to answer or talk on cellphones. Many people keep their phone in 'manner mode' silent mode in order to not bother others and to avoid embarrassment on trains.