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There are good reasons to be worried about children and mobile phones, says Michael Fitzpatrick Internet news
Thursday May 10, 2001 The Guardian
Now that there is a mobile for every adult in the UK, it is the children's turn. And while it has become more expensive to use pay-as-you-go phones, the coming "chat 'n' chuck" phones will make it even easier for children to join the mobile revolution. However, sociologists in Japan, where mobiles have been common among the young for some time and where services are more sophisticated, see an alarming trend, one that we in the UK are likely to follow.
In Tokyo, for example, one- quarter of all four to 15-year-olds has a mobile phone. Well over half of Japan's high school students owns one, many of them internet enabled. Half the children polled recently said their lifestyle "required" them to have a mobile phone, while 41.5% said their parents "forced" them to have one.
A vox pop conducted on the Tokyo streets by Japan Today magazine, however, suggests that the nations' teens have other reasons for keeping hold of "their best electric friend".
"If I can't find my phone I feel really isolated from my friends," says 16-year-old Asuka Maezawa. Emi Inoue, 17, agrees, adding: "It's great for talking to friends about gossip I don't want my parents to hear."
The more thorough survey commissioned by NTT DoCoMo also revealed that about 22% said they talked at least 10 times per day, while 45% said they used their mobile to send 10 or more text messages each day.
Parents were also surveyed, with more than a third feeling their children spent too much time on the phone, while 23% said the mobile made it difficult for them to keep tabs on with whom their children were communicating. Tokyo parents may have good reason to be worried, since 26% of the children said they were regularly corresponding with people they had never met.
Such density of mobile ownership, especially among the young, has lead to a new type of neurosis, say sociologists. Japanese teens, in particular, have become fanatical about being "always available".