Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  The rise and rise of the mobile phone (11 May 2005) 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." Article URL: http://www.nestafuturelab.org/viewpoint/art50.htm Read 122 more articles from NESTA Futurelab sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: What are multimodality, multisemiotics and multiliteracies?     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy