The Mobile Phone and You: Human Interaction and
Integration with Mobile Technology
Anthropology theses by Doctor Ryan C. Miller from
Georgia state university
The study : To understand the impact of mobile phones on those that use them, I decided to
conduct an ethnographic study of students aged 18-30 who were attending Georgia State
University. I conducted semi-structured interviews with fourteen students in this age group,
asking them questions about their use of their mobile phone and how they perceived their use
in their everyday life.
The conclusion : Our daily routines, the behaviors that we exhibit, the routes that we walk or
drive, become “natural” and we begin to take things for granted. We don’t usually reflect
critically about the mundane acts of daily life. Life on autopilot saves us from expending energy
on our habits and we can focus on more important matters. At the same time, some pieces of
our life can be overlooked. The mobile phone is a relatively new technology, especially the
smartphone. Adopting these devices and carrying them on us near constantly has shifted that
routine but as with all things we have adapted to them over time. Mobile phones are common,
their usage prevalent, and almost invisible to us as we tend to normalize their availability.
When it becomes normal to own a mobile phone, people may stop questioning how they use
these devices until there comes a time when they directly affect us (i.e. being interrupted at
dinner by a phone or getting into a car accident due to phone use). Going about their daily life,
So how has the mobile phone influenced college student’s daily life? Through my research, and
the research of other social scientists, mobile phones are found to influence communication,
work, information, our sense of space and place, our perception of ourselves and others, our
relationships with others and even our relationship with ourselves. Students with a mobile
phone are changed, they are “human +”, with the added features and functionalities of the
phone. They can be constantly connected to others through the internet and communicative
methods of the mobile phone. Asynchronous communication especially has shifted the
established social spheres of the past. Whereas the demarcation of work and play spaces had
been well defined, one’s office can now be a place to bond with family or one can work on their
vacation, thousands of miles away from their desk, due to this constant connection. The mobile
phone was found to be a conflicting technology, offering contradictory features and produced
contradictory feelings for users. Participants found that their mobile phone was a source of
anxiety and relief, of safety and risk, of connection and disconnection. Mobile phones today are
extremely complex and this complexity has caused people, users or not, to question the degree
to which these devices are good for humanity. I believe that the mobile phone can be a greatly
beneficial technology. It allows us to connect in ways that we never have before, it allows us to
have a plethora of information at our fingertips at all times. It does so many things that can
help a person to become more capable than we have ever been. At the same time, mobile
phone use can be detrimental to the health and safety of others. Driving a car or walking while
staring at a mobile phone screen can end one’s life in an instant… or just make us accidentally
walk into a pole. The mobile phone can cause users to be overwhelmed by expectations to stay
in contact with others and users can be overwhelmed just by the complexity of the device. It
causes anxiety when we have it and possibly even more anxiety when it is taken away. It is
difficult to say whether the mobile phone is inherently good or bad because our use of our
phone dictates whether this technology is used in a way that is beneficial or detrimental to
ourselves.
The mobile phone helps to make us who we are today. Users are “human +” now. It is up to
each individual to define what that “+” means for them. Will a mobile phone user choose to
answer a text while driving? Will a mobile phone user choose to memorize the trivial
information that can be stored on a phone, just in case they lose it? Will a mobile phone user
choose to text a friend when they could get together to talk face to face? The choices that
individuals make as they use their mobile phone change who they are and how they interact
with their socio-cultural world. The mobile phone gives us the power to choose how we live our
life in little, and sometimes big, ways. With the power a mobile phone can grant an individual, a
112 responsibility to use that power in the greater interest of themselves and others is also
placed upon the user.