Tag: mobile phones

Put Your Phone under a Bushel

Since having someone to listen to them is so important to missionaries and other cross-cultural workers, I thought I’d put together a list of ways to be a good listener. One of the first things I thought of was

Let the person you’re talking with know that you’re giving him your full attention by turning your cell phone to silent and putting it on the table.

phonecupSounds good, right?

Wrong. And here’s why:

Just having a cell phone in view, even when it’s not being used—even when it’s not turned on—hinders the development of relationships. This is the finding of a study conducted by Andrew Przybylski and Netta Weinstein, of the University of Essex, as published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

In the first of two experiments, Przybylski and Weinstein paired up strangers and asked them to talk about something that had happened to them over the past month. The participants left their belongings in a waiting area, and then they went to a private booth for their conversations. The booth contained two chairs, facing each other, with a table off to the side. For half of the pairs, on the table was a cell phone on top of a book. For the other half, the phone was replaced  with a pocket notebook.

The result was that partners who had a conversation in the presence of a cell phone felt less close to each other and had a lower quality of relationship compared to their counterparts who talked without a phone nearby.

Since the conversation in the first experiment dealt with a “moderately intimate topic,” the second experiment looked at the effects of a cell phone on less intimate conversations (about plastic trees) and more intimate conversations (about “the most meaningful events of the past year”).

In this exercise, the researchers continued to look at the quality of relationships and also added evaluations of the levels of trust and empathy. The results showed that the phone had little or no effect on those who were talking on the casual topic, but participants reported lower levels of relationship quality, trust, and perceived empathy when the phone was in view. And even though the more meaningful conversation topics encouraged more closeness and trust when the phone was absent, when the phone was present, the levels of intimacy were actually lower than when the topic was focused only on plastic trees.

It’s notable that these effects happened even when participants didn’t remember seeing the phone in the room.

So what is a good listener to do?

Here are some suggestions:

  1. Turn your phone to silent or turn it off. Turning it to vibrate won’t do. Anything that pulls your attention to the phone, even if you ignore it, will disrupt the relationship you’re trying to form.
  2. Don’t put your phone where it can be seen.
  3. You might suggest to your partner that he not get out his phone either. Explain to him how important your meeting is and tell him how you don’t want anything to hinder him or you. (Cross-cultural workers who have visited an embassy know what it’s like to have a meeting and have to leave their cell phones outside. If the meeting’s important enough, the sacrifice can be made.)
  4. If a true emergency requires you to keep your phone on, understand that you will be distracted not only by every call and text that comes in, emergency or not, but by the presence of the phone itself. At the very least, apologize and understand the limitations of a meeting under those conditions.

Don’t let your phone, or anyone’s phone, hinder you from fully investing in someone. Don’t let the Siren song of your social networks pull you away from the person across from you who needs a face-to-face conversation. And, of course, don’t be the person who answers calls, who texts, who tweets, and who checks Facebook while he’s supposed to be paying attention to the person in front of him. That’s not the way to grow a relationship, to foster trust, and to show empathy. And aren’t those the things that a good listener wants to do?

(Anddrew K. Przybylski and Netta Weinstein, “Can You Connect with Me Now? How the Presence of Mobile Communication Technology Influences Face-to-Face Conversation Quality,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, July 19, 2012)

[photo: “iPhone + COFFEE,” by Kondo Atsushi, used under a Creative Commons license]

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Global Stats and Stuff: Technology and the Internet

  • “In October 2011, 1.2 billion users around the world visited social networking sites, accounting for 82 percent of the world’s [internet] population. Nearly 1 in every 5 minutes spent online around the world is now spent on social networking sites, making Social Networking the most popular content category in engagement worldwide.”

(“Carmela Aquino, “It’s a Social World: A Global Look at Social Networking,”  comScore Voices, January 6, 2012)

  • Any two people in the world on Facebook are separated by an average of 4.74 “hops,” meaning that for “even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rainforest, a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend.”

(Lars Bakstrom, “Anatomy of Facebook, November 21, 2011)

  • 60 Second Marketer contributing writer Nicole Hall took a deep look at the claim that the world has more mobile phones than toothbrushes. Her conclusion is “that there are almost certainly more mobile phone subscriptions than there are toothbrushes on the planet. And, if you make some additional assumptions based on our research, in all likelihood, more people own a mobile phone on the planet than own a toothbrush.”

(Nicole Hall, “Are There REALLY More Mobile Phones Than Toothbrushes?” 60 Second Marketer)

  • Globally, “22% of online shoppers made their first online purchases within the past year.”
  • Chinese online consumers lead the world with an average of 8.4 purchase online each month. This compares with 5.2 purchases in the US and 4.3 in the UK.

(“Global Multi-Channel Consumer Survey 2011,” PwC)

[photo: “Internet & Tacos,” by lecates, used under a Creative Commons license]

Of Mobile Phones and Commodes

One of the biggest changes in technology over the last few years has been the global explosion of cell phones. In many communities, lagging behind the developed world in land-line phone infrastructure, the people have completely skipped that step and have jumped directly to cell phone use. Two years ago, Keith Williams and Leith Gray wrote an article highlighting the potential of using mobile phones in cross-cultural Christian evangelism. Though the numbers have changed some since 2010, here are a few interesting points they collected for their article:

• There are more than 5 billion cell phone subscriptions in the world.

• Today’s smart phone is thousands of times more powerful than the computers that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon.

• The CEO of Google predicts that smart phone sales will surpass those of PCs by 2013, and by the same year, cell-phone data traffic will increase 66 times.

• Leading up to 2009, cell-phone use by Africans grew 550% in 5 years.

• In India, 20 million people each month get new cell-phone lines, in fact, “the people of India now have better access to mobile phones than to toilets.”

(Williams and Gray, “The Little Phone That Could: Mobile-Empowered Ministry,” International Journal of Frontier Missiology, Fall 2010)

I found these statistics to back up that last statement: A recent survey in India shows that while 53.2% of the people have cell phones, only 46.9% have toilets inside their homes. This means that the majority of the population must use public latrines (3.2%) or simply relieve themselves outside (49.8%).

(P. Sunderarajan, “Half of India’s Homes Have Cellphones, but Not Toilets,” The Hindu, March 14, 2012)

India is not the only country with this problem, and it’s a serious problem. According to Toilet Twinning,

2.6 billion people—that’s 40% of the world’s population—don’t have somewhere safe, clean and hygienic to go to the loo. The human impact of this scandalous stat is enormous: nearly one in five child deaths each year is due to diarrhea.

What is Toilet Twinning? It’s a partnership between UK-based charities Cord and Tearfund that allows donors to “twin” a toilet in their own home by paying for a new one to be built in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Cambodia. The cost for each one is £60 (about  US$100) and payments can be made from outside the UK using PayPal. Donors receive a framed certificate showing the new latrine, along with its GPS coordinates.

And just to bring this post full circle . . . Toilet Twinning reports that 1/4 of the people in Great Britain are serious multi-taskers, using their cell phones—for talking, texting, emailing, Facebooking, or Tweeting—while sitting on the commode.

(“Lifting the Lid on Britain’s Toilet Habits,” Toilet Twinning, November 19, 2010)

[photo: “toilet-phone,” by jan zeschky, used under a Creative Commons license]