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The rise and rise of the mobile phone
An interview with Josh Dhaliwal, Director, mobileYouth
By Kim Thomas |
If anyone is well-placed to comment on trends in wireless technology, it's Josh Dhaliwal. During his period at ITN, he worked with Orange on the development of their internet portals and on Europe's first mobile news service. Four years ago, he co-founded the Wireless World Forum (WWF), a networking forum for industry executives. The research and consultancy organisation mobileYouth is a subset of the WWF, and carries out an annual survey into mobile phone usage by the young. These surveys are comprehensive, using face-to-face interviews with young people, observational techniques and interviews with senior people in the mobile phone industry to draw up a picture of how mobile phones are being used.
These surveys have provided a yearly snapshot of the state of the mobile phone industry, and the inexorable rise of mobile phone usage by young people. The results are generally startling enough to guarantee wide media coverage, and the 2005 report is no exception. Most newspapers led on the finding that more than a million 5-9 year-old children now have a mobile phone - a third of all children in that age group. Equally astounding is the finding that that figure has doubled in two years.
All this is despite the advice of the 2005 Stewart report, which recommended that children should minimise their use of a mobile phone and that those under 10 shouldn't have one at all. "You have to look at why, given the potential health warnings, has it continued to increase," says Josh. "And I think there's a certain amount of remote parenting involved. 95% of children under the age of 14 (who own a mobile phone) are given a mobile phone by their parents. Parents like to know where their children are. It's a security blanket."
Despite the opprobrium that mobile phone companies often attract, Josh points out that this increase in mobile phone is not the result of advertising or marketing pressure: "In the UK we have very strict regulation and an industry code of practice. Mobile phone companies do not actively market mobile phones at young people."
Yet the average age at which a British child has its first mobile phone is now 8. This increase in mobile phone ownership among children and young people is a social change that has been brought about, at least partly, by the attitudes of children themselves rather than by the phone companies. "Your first mobile phone has been described as a rite of passage," says Josh. "Amongst older children, it does serve as a status symbol - the mobile phone competes with cigarettes."
What are children using the phones for? Apart from making voice calls, says Josh, the main uses are for sending text messages and downloading ring tones. Boys tend to send more text messages than girls - a finding that seems counter-intuitive until you realise that girls prefer to make voice calls.
Apart from the potential health risks of using phones, there are other concerns about the level of usage. Josh cites several. One, he says, is that some teenagers are running up huge debts on their mobile phones - as much as £300 a year. For every £10 that young people spend, £1 is on mobile phone usage. Much of this is spent on music - the report predicted that this year young people will spend £150 million downloading ringtones, ring-back tunes and full songs. A few years ago, Josh points out, chocolate sales among the young began to fall - something that was perceived as the consequence of increased mobile phone spending.
Another concern is the effect that texting is having on written English. Josh says that some academics see the rise in texting as a positive thing, because young people are using the written word more than they used to. In practice, he is unconvinced. His organisation has received CVs written in text-speak and these, he says, "go straight in the bin."
Although parents give their children mobile phones in the hope of protecting them from crime, a rising number of children who own mobile phones are becoming victims of theft, says Josh. And there is increasing evidence, he adds, that some older children are using mobile phones for more sinister purposes, such as downloading pornography. A particularly disturbing trend has emerged with the growing use of mobile phones as a tool in bullying - sending hurtful text messages, for example, or taking pictures of playground fights with cameraphones.
There are positive uses emerging too. Mobile phones can be used to reach vulnerable young people, says Josh, because even if they are hard to reach in other ways, they almost always have a mobile phone. In Josh's home-town of Wolverhampton, mobileYouth, along with charity Base 25 and providers Orange Business Solutions and PrimetexT, has been working with a local drop-in centre that helps young people to put questions to trained counsellors via text messages. Those young people can then be encouraged to come in and seek advice from the counsellors on any number of subjects, such as contraception or dealing with bullying.
The other encouraging trend, says Josh, is towards mobile learning, or m-learning, in which educational content is delivered via mobile devices. A lot of research into this is being carried out in this country by, for example, the Learning & Skills Development Agency, although there is still a long way to go.
In the long term, it seems likely that mobile phone usage among the young will continue to increase, and that the average age at which a child receives a mobile phone will continue to fall. In Japan, a highly developed mobile market which Josh says is often a reliable indicator of future trends elsewhere, one manufacturer developed a working toy phone, called 'My First Phone', in pink and blue, and aimed specifically at 6-8 year-olds. The current industry code forbids this kind of marketing in Britain but it does give us a glimpse of a possible future. Could it be that in a few years' time mobile phones will replace the teddy bear as the 5 year-old's accessory of choice? It's too soon to say - but if it happens, mobileYouth will be the first to tell us about it.
Links
mobileYouth: www.mobileyouth.org
May 2005
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