Voices of Humans Fading from Cellphones

Cellphones Now Used More for Data Than for Calls - NYTimes.com

By JENNA WORTHAM

Liza Colburn uses her cellphone constantly.

She taps out her grocery lists, records voice memos, listens to music at the gym, tracks her caloric intake and posts frequent updates to her Twitter and Facebook accounts.

The one thing she doesn’t use her cellphone for? Making calls.

“I probably only talk to someone verbally on it once a week,” said Mrs. Colburn, a 40-year-old marketing consultant in Canton, Mass., who has an iPhone.

Jodi Hilton for The New York Times

Liza Colburn and her 12-year-old daughter, Abigail, use their cellphones for many tasks, but make relatively few phone calls.

For many Americans, cellphones have become irreplaceable tools to manage their lives and stay connected to the outside world, their families and networks of friends online. But increasingly, by several measures, that does not mean talking on them very much.

For example, although almost 90 percent of households in the United States now have a cellphone, the growth in voice minutes used by consumers has stagnated, according to government and industry data.

This is true even though more households each year are disconnecting their landlines in favor of cellphones.

Instead of talking on their cellphones, people are making use of all the extras that iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones were also designed to do — browse the Web, listen to music, watch television, play games and send e-mail and text messages.

The number of text messages sent per user increased by nearly 50 percent nationwide last year, according to the CTIA, the wireless industry association. And for the first time in the United States, the amount of data in text, e-mail messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices in 2009 surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls, industry executives and analysts say.

“Originally, talking was the only cellphone application,” said Dan Hesse, chief executive of Sprint Nextel. “But now it’s less than half of the traffic on mobile networks.”

Of course, talking on the cellphone isn’t disappearing entirely. “Anytime something is sensitive or is something I don’t want to be forwarded, I pick up the phone rather than put it into a tweet or a text,” said Kristen Kulinowski, a 41-year-old chemistry teacher in Houston. And calling is cheaper than ever because of fierce competition among rival wireless networks.

But figures from the CTIA show that over the last two years, the average number of voice minutes per user in the United States has fallen.

Still, even the telephone design industry has taken note. Ross Rubin, a telecommunications analyst with the NPD Group, said cellphones outfitted with numerical keyboards — easiest for quickly dialing a phone number — were no longer in vogue. Touch screens, or quick messaging devices with full “qwerty” keyboards, on the other hand, are. On the newest phones, users must press several buttons or swipe through several screens to get to the application that allows them to make calls.

“Handset design has become far less cheek-friendly,” Mr. Rubin said. Mr. Hesse of Sprint said he expected that within the next couple of years, cellphone users would be charged by the data they used, not by their voice minutes, a prediction echoed by other industry executives.

When people do talk on their phones, their conversations are shorter; the average length of a local call was 1.81 minutes in 2009, compared with 2.27 minutes in 2008, according to CTIA. For some, the unused voice minutes mount up.

“I have thousands of rollover minutes,” said Zach Frechette, 28, editor of Good magazine in Los Angeles, who explained that he dialed only when he needed to get in touch with someone instantly, and limited those calls to 30 seconds. “I downgraded to the lowest available minute plan, which I’m not even getting close to using.”

Mr. Frechette said part of the reason he rarely talked on his phone was that he had an iPhone, with its notoriously spotty phone reception in certain locales. But also, he said, most of his day was spent swapping short messages through services like Gmail, Facebook and Twitter. That way, he said, “you can respond when it’s convenient, rather than impose your schedule on someone else.”

Others say talking on the phone is intrusive and time-consuming, while others seem to have no patience for talking to just one person at a time. They prefer to spend their phone time moving seamlessly between several conversations, catching up on the latest news and updates by text and on Facebook with multiple friends, instead of just one or two.

“Even though in theory, it might take longer to send a text than pick up the phone, it seems less disruptive than a call,” said Jefferson Adams, a 44-year-old freelance writer living in San Francisco. By texting, he said, “you can multitask between two or three conversations at once.”

Nicole Wahl, a 35-year-old communications manager at the University of Toronto, estimates she talks on her phone only about 10 minutes a month.

“The only reason I ever call someone anymore is if I don’t have their Twitter handle or e-mail address,” Ms. Wahl said. “Like my hairdresser to see if she has a last-minute appointment or my parents to say I’m dropping by.”

American teenagers have been ahead of the curve for a while, turning their cellphones into texting machines; more than half of them send about 1,500 text messages each month, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.

Mrs. Colburn, from Massachusetts, said she caved to the pleading of her 12-year-old daughter Abigail for a cellphone to send text messages with her friends after she and her husband discovered it was hindering her from developing bonds with her classmates.

“We realized she was being excluded from party invitations and being in the know with her peers,” she said.

Mrs. Colburn said texting had also become a much easier way to stay in touch with her daughter and receive quick updates about after-school plans.

“The other night she texted me from upstairs to ask a vocabulary question,” she said with a laugh. “But I drew the line there. I went upstairs to answer it.”

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U.S. cellphone users donate $22 million to Haiti earthquake relief via text

Image by Swamibu via Flickr

By Thomas Heath
Tuesday, January 19, 2010; A10

The American Red Cross has received more than $22 million in U.S. text-message donations for Haiti earthquake relief efforts, far outpacing the charity's previous record of $400,000 for emergency relief using similar technology.

"It's truly an unprecedented amount for a text campaign," said American Red Cross spokesman Roger Lowe.

The $22 million is roughly one-fifth of the $112 million total that the American Red Cross has so far raised for Haiti, most of which has come through more conventional sources such as corporate and online donations.

The text-messaging effort involves sending the word "Haiti" in a cellphone text message to the number 90999, which automatically adds a $10 pledge to a person's phone bill.

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Wireless providers have said they are forgoing standard text-messaging fees for the Haiti effort.

"We make no money on this," said Verizon Wireless spokesman Jeffrey Nelson.

To get the money to Haiti faster, Verizon said Monday that it transmitted nearly $3 million in text-message pledges to the American Red Cross. Normally, telecommunications companies wait for the user to pay their phone bill, a process that can take a few months, before passing the donation to the charity.

"I think it's great," said Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, a watchdog group. "They should expedite the funds as rapidly as possible, and I am glad that they are doing that."

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The American Red Cross is not the only group to see a surge in contributions via text messaging. Hundreds of thousands of people have donated using their cellphones. The technology allows charities to tap into new sources of giving, such as young adults.

"The beauty of it is the young people who don't give will give because it's so easy," Borochoff said. "They hit a few buttons and they can show off, and it's the cooler and hipper way than getting out your credit card or whipping out a check like your parents do."

The mobile donation network was set up through the nonprofit Mobile Giving Foundation and is connected with all four major U.S. cellphone carriers -- Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint and AT&T.

28 percent of accidents involve talking, texting on cellphones

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By Ashley Halsey III
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 13, 2010; A06

Twenty-eight percent of traffic accidents occur when people talk on cellphones or send text messages while driving, according to a study released Tuesday by the National Safety Council.

The vast majority of those crashes, 1.4 million annually, are caused by cellphone conversations, and 200,000 are blamed on text messaging, according to the report from the council, a nonprofit group recognized by congressional charter as a leader on safety.

Because of the extent of the problem, federal transportation officials unveiled a organization Tuesday, patterned after Mothers Against Drunk Driving, that will combat driver cellphone use. The group, FocusDriven, grew out of a meeting on distracted driving sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation in the District last year.

Virtually everyone owns a cellphone, and it's evident to anyone who drives regularly that huge numbers of people, including some who support a ban, use them while driving. Persuading people to break that habit could be a tall order for FocusDriven.

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"It's hard because everyone's addicted to their cellphone," said FocusDriven's president, Jennifer Smith, a Texan whose mother was killed by a man who ran a red light while talking on his cellphone. "That's where we come in. We put a real, human face to it. We're going to put the pressure on legislatures."

Enforcement of a texting ban requires officers to observe an act that usually is conducted in a driver's lap, and hands-free devices make it possible to talk on cellphones without being observed. More than 120 studies of cellphone use suggest that using hands-free devices doesn't eliminate the distraction caused by a phone conversation.

"It's not easy to enforce [a ban], but it's not impossible," said Chuck Hurley, executive director of MADD, who attended Tuesday's announcement of the new group's formation. "The main reason people talk on their cellphones is because they can. Eventually, [signal blocking] technology will address that."

Smith said law enforcement needs stronger laws and better tools to enforce them.

"Using a subpoena to get cellphone records has got to be a standard procedure," she said. "Perhaps cars should have a data recorder, like [an airplane's] crash recorder to use in these cases."

Whether the political will to enforce bans on cellphone use while driving exists is another matter.

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Bans on text messaging while driving illustrate the challenge. Nineteen states and the District have banned it, but in four of those states, Virginia, New York, Washington and Louisiana, the laws require that an officer have some other primary reason for stopping a vehicle.

"That makes it impossible for police to enforce it effectively," said Illinois state Sen. John J. Cullerton (D), a leading traffic safety advocate. "It's a convenient way to compromise and get bills passed in state legislatures."

Hurley put it more bluntly:

"Secondary enforcement is a huge problem," he said. "It is a sign of weak politicians. It saves very few lives."

Maryland bans drivers sending text messages but allows drivers to read them or enter phone numbers in their cellphones. Virginians stopped by police are off the hook if they say they were dialing a phone number or using a GPS device on their phone.

The challenge of legislating cellphone use by drivers is greater than similar auto safety initiatives such as those in favor of seat belts and child car seat use or against drunken driving. In each of those instances, the public safety issue was more clearly understood and, ultimately, enforcement led drivers to comply.

Hurley, who spent 21 years with the National Safety Council before joining MADD, has been involved with virtually all major traffic safety campaigns for more than three decades.

Image via Wikipedia

His experience suggests that new laws and educational campaigns, such as trumpeting the startling numbers the National Safety Council released Tuesday, don't provide sufficient incentive for most drivers to change their habits.

"A lot of goodwill is created, and people die just the same," he said. "Education alone is a proven failure. Education and enforcement are a success."

He cites seat belt use as an example. The "Buckle Up for Safety" campaign was well received, but only 13 percent of drivers complied. The "Click It or Ticket" campaign has been much more effective, he said.

Public campaigns featuring mothers whose children died in crashes where drinking was a factor caught public attention, but the Operation Strikeforce efforts that employed sobriety checkpoints hammered home the consequences of drunken driving.

Hurley said the best first step for FocusDriven will be to get employers to ban use of text messaging and cellphones when driving. President Obama last year imposed a texting ban on all federal employees while using government vehicles or using government-issued phones in their own vehicles.

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A rush to learn English by cell - washingtonpost.com

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More than 300,000 Bangladeshis sign up for new phone service

By Maija Palmer and Amy Kazmin
Saturday, November 14, 2009

More than 300,000 people in Bangladesh, one of Asia's poorest but fastest-growing economies, have rushed to sign up to learn English over their cellphones, threatening to swamp the service even before its official launch Thursday.

"We were not expecting that kind of response -- 25,000 people would have been a good response on the first day," said Sara Chamberlain, the manager of the discount service. "Instead, we got hundreds of thousands of people."

The project, which costs users less than the price of a cup of tea for each three-minute lesson, is being run by the BBC World Service Trust, the international charity arm of the broadcaster. Part of a British government initiative to help develop English skills in Bangladesh, it marks the first time that cellphones have been used as an educational tool on this scale.

Since cellphone services began in Bangladesh just over a decade ago, more than 50 million Bangladeshis have acquired phone connections, including many in remote rural areas. That far outnumbers the 4 million who have Internet access.

English is increasingly seen as a key to economic mobility, especially as ever larger numbers of Bangladeshis go abroad to find work unavailable to them at home. An estimated 6.2 million Bangladeshis work overseas, and their nearly $10 billion in annual remittances represent the country's second-largest source of foreign exchange.

However, English is also important for securing jobs at home, where about 70 percent of employers look for workers with "communicative English."

Through its Janala service, the BBC offers 250 audio and text-message lessons at different levels -- from basic English conversation to grammar and comprehension of simple news stories. Each lesson is a three-minute phone call, costing about 4 cents.

One basic lesson involves listening to and repeating simple dialogue such as: "What do you do?"

"I work in IT, what about you?"

"I'm a student."

"That's nice."

All six cellphone operators in Bangladesh have agreed to cut the cost of calls to the service by 50 percent to make it more affordable. Chamberlain also said the project team was in talks with the cellphone companies to increase capacity to cope with the unexpectedly high demand.

The launch of the service comes just a few weeks after Grameenphone, the country's largest cellphone operator, held Bangladesh's largest initial public offering. Shares in the company are due to start trading on the Dhaka Stock Exchange next week.

The language lessons target mainly 18- to 24-year-olds, who typically have five or more years of formal education but whose training in English has been weak. Also targeted are people living on less than $145 a month, who would struggle to pay for formal English lessons.

Chamberlain said the service could be developed later to offer tailored English instruction to people in different industries, such as call centers, garment factories and the tourist industry.

-- Financial Times

Palmer reported from London and Kazmin from New Delhi.

Their Numbers Are Dropping - the Cellphone Refuseniks - NYTimes.com

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By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Not so long ago, we all lived in a world in which we decided where to meet friends before leaving the house and we hiked to the nearest payphone if we got a flat tire. Then we got cellphones.

Well, not everyone. For a hardy few that choose to ignore cellphones, life is a pocketful of quarters, missed connections and a smug satisfaction of marching to a different ring tone.

For Linda Mboya, 32, who lives in Brooklyn and works on arts and education programs at a nonprofit group, it also involves never letting sleeping dogs lie.

A friend who lives on the top floor of a house in Brooklyn has a perpetually broken apartment buzzer. So Ms. Mboya makes noise to disturb the dogs who live on the first floor, who then bark and announce her arrival to her friend.

“This system works pretty well,” Ms. Mboya said, though the dogs’ owners might disagree.

For many people, cellphones have become indispensable appendages that make calls, deliver e-mail messages, locate restaurants and identify the song on the radio. After 20 years, 85 percent of adult Americans have cellphones, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. According to the Federal Communications Commission, cellphones caught on faster than cable TV and personal computers although, by some accounts, broadband Internet service was adopted faster.

Those who still do not have them, according to Pew, tend to be older or less educated Americans or those unable to afford phones. “These are people who have a bunch of other struggles in their lives and the expense of maintaining technology and mastering it is also pretty significant for them,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew project.

But there is also a smaller subset of adults who resist cellphones simply because they do not want them. They resent the way that ring tones, tiny keyboards and screens disrupt face-to-face conversation. They savor their moments alone and prize the fact that no one knows how to reach them.

“It’s a luxury not to be reached when I’m out and about,” said Gregory Han, a 34-year-old writer and editor living in Los Angeles. Life for him is a lot more planned than most, the consequence of not having a cellphone — or even a landline — at home.

When his mother recently went to the hospital, the family’s communication plan went into action: his mother called his sister, who sent him an instant message on his computer, to which he replied with a call using Skype over the Web. When he travels for work, he prepares his boss with a list of ways to reach him and colleagues to call if he is unreachable, a modern-day version of Tony Roberts’s neurotic character giving minute-by-minute updates of where he would be reachable in the pre-BlackBerry era of Woody Allen’s “Play It Again, Sam.”

Far from being technology-resistant, Mr. Han makes a living blogging about interior design and tech gadgets. He initially got rid of his cellphone to save money, but “I feel I benefit by living in the moment and not having a ring or a buzz or an inclination to always look at the screen.”

These cellphone “refuseniks” probably account for less than 5 percent of those who do not have cellphones, said John Horrigan, consumer research director at the National Broadband Task Force. Though many cellphone owners express growing displeasure about cellphones’ intrusions into their lives, according to Pew, a tiny and most likely shrinking number actually manage to resist them completely.

“Ambivalent networkers bristle at all their gadget-facilitated connectivity, but don’t give it up,” Mr. Horrigan said. “The cell refuseniks are making a statement that they control their availability.”

The painstaking plans that people without cellphones must make to navigate the world show just how dependent the rest of us have become on our phones.

Ms. Mboya always picks a time and a landmark to meet friends and carries quarters in case she has to use a payphone.

Still, her friends are not used to planning their social lives in advance. A recent brunch date required several three-way planning phone calls among Ms. Mboya and two friends. “I can only do that periodically,” said Sheila Shirazi, one of the friends. “I don’t have the time and energy to coordinate to the extent it takes with somebody who isn’t mobile. It’s just not something I’m used to.”

And even the best-laid plans falter. Jenna Catsos, 22, does not have a cellphone because she thinks the idea of always being reachable is “scary” and prefers to keep in touch with handwritten letters. While at college in rural Vermont, Ms. Catsos decided to drive to Massachusetts to surprise her father for his birthday. Halfway there, her car’s transmission broke down. She walked half a mile to the nearest gas station and called her parents from the payphone, but because they were not expecting her, they were not home. After leaving a message with the payphone number, she stood in the gas station parking lot for an hour waiting for them to call back.

“It’s situations like that when I would really love to have a phone,” she said. That might happen sooner than she would like, because she will start looking for a new job this winter and stay on friends’ couches for a few weeks, without her own landline. “It’s really getting impossible not to have one.”

Cell Phones Outpace Internet Access in Middle East

by Steve Crabtree

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Recent Gallup Polls in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) highlight the prevalence of wireless and Web-based communication among populations in that region.

Cellular phones are fairly ubiquitous in the MENA region; even in its most poverty-stricken areas such as Yemen and the Palestinian Territories, majorities of residents say they have cell phones. Home Internet access, on the other hand, is prevalent only among citizens of the oil-rich Persian Gulf states (it should be noted that non-Arab expatriates in these countries were not included in the survey) and Israel. However, in many countries, public Internet cafes can often be found in major cities.

Urban Internet cafes also reflect that in many countries, new information technologies are so far more accessible to city dwellers than to rural residents, who also tend to be less affluent on average. Three-fourths of urban Iranians, for example, said they have a cellular phone vs. two-thirds (66%) of those living in small towns and less than half (45%) of those living in rural areas or on farms. Similarly, almost half (48%) of Iranians in urban areas said they had home Internet access vs. 36% of those living in small towns and just 9% of rural residents. Sizable urban/rural divides are seen in several other MENA countries with substantial rural populations.

Bottom Line

New information technologies are creating or reshaping networks of social, economic, and political actors in most of the world, including the MENA region. Previously disconnected communities and interest groups now have more tools to work together in support of common interests.

However, the finding that wireless and Web technologies are often disproportionately accessible to urban populations sounds a cautionary note; in countries characterized by extreme income inequality, lack of access has the potential to further isolate those in poor, rural communities. It will be important to monitor the spread of such technologies, particularly in politically volatile regions and countries, to better understand the role they play in facilitating -- or undermining -- change.

Survey Methods

Results are based on face-to-face interviews with approximately 1,000 adults, aged 15 and older, in each country. Iranian data were collected in May 2008 and Israeli data in October 2008. Surveys in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, Qatar, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen were conducted February-April, 2009. Non-Arabs were excluded from the sample in Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates; samples in these countries are nationally representative of Arab adults. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error ranged from a low of ±3.3 percentage points in Tunisia to a high of ±3.8 percentage points in Yemen. The margin of error reflects the influence of data weighting. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.