Text Life: The New Mobile Etiquette
Published 3rd Jun 2003 by Dan

Ahead of me, on the bus, a girl sits alone. Lifelessly, she gazes out of the window. As her phone rings she is thrust into life:

"Hello, oh hello! How are you?"

"I?m on the bus, where are you?"

The situation is a familiar one, one that is replayed and repeated on every bus, train and tube journey across the world.

Today, one in six people in the world, over 1 billion people, owns a mobile phone. This year, for the first time, the number of people owning a mobile will exceed the number of people owning a landline.

No nation has fallen victim to the world-wide epidemic of the mobile phone to the same extent as the U.K. Roughly three quarters of people in Britain own a mobile phone. Comparatively, in Ethiopia and Tajikistan, only 0.04% of the population owns a mobile (understandable really). The mobile revolution has well and truly begun.

At every bar across the country noisy enough for you not to be able to hear your phone even if it were to ring, next to the packet of cigarettes and pint of lager, tables are being decorated with the latest and newest design of mobile phone. They have become the fashion accessory of the 21st century, as vital to your person as your credit card. Walk into any primary school and you will be met by the imperious sign ?Please turn off your mobile?. A fact that goes some way towards explaining the phenomena that the latest wave of bullying incidents in schools have taken the form of the anonymous text. These harassments composed a small part of the 1 billion text messages that were sent in the U.K last year, and an even smaller part of the 20billion that were sent world-wide.

Beyond the level of simple statistics that reveal our love affair with the phone, the mobile has constructed it?s own social etiquette. Their use is forbidden in establishments such as libraries, churches, schools, lecture halls, and on planes. When Tony Blair recently protested about having to turn his mobile phone off during take-off the pilot replied "I don?t care who it is mate, rules are rules". (He was taking a call from the Queen). Restaurants also provide their own unspoken mobile phone code. Whereas phone users are more than happy to place their phone on any pub table or bar surface, when presented with a tablecloth, they coyly switch their phone off, placing it carefully in sight at the top of their bag.

These mobile codes of conduct extend to all walks of life. From your phone?s ringtone to the content of the conversation you have when you answer it, your phone speaks volumes about the type of person you are.

We all scoff at the girl on the bus, in front of me, as she informs us all of her recent life history, how things are going with her boyfriend, how hard she?s working at her A-levels, the divorce her parents are going through, it all makes for interesting listening, and that is what we all do: we listen. From over the tops of newspapers and as we are pretending to look out of the window, we experience the privilege of being given a little insight into another life. Yet instead of being thankful for this, for allowing us this glimpse into her existence, an existence as distant and different from ours as ours are from each other's, we scoff. She has just given us a glimpse in search of which we read countless stories and watch endless docu-soaps or reality TV shows, and we scoff because she embarks on a conversation into which we did not invite her to enter. Of course when it is the turn of our phone to whistle out the latest ringtone, we forget all snobbery and scramble for our phones before we miss the call.

It is inbuilt within us that we cannot help but to check our phones when we hear the familiar ?beep beep? of the incoming text message. In every crowded area, as subtly as possible and without giving the game away, we all reach for our phones to check if it was our phone that just received the text. Secretly we are jealous when we realise that it wasn?t our phone but the guy behind?s. It is he who has just received a text and that means that it is he who, for the next few seconds at least, can feel like the most desired and loved person present.

This is what the mobile phone means to us. It has become a statement of the self - a consumerist piece of existentiality, the individual weighted by his own individuality. It defines who and what you are, it shows us who your friends are, which numbers you call most often, it displays your

popularity and it shows us whether you are open or closed, cold or warm, whether you like to listen or to talk.

More than that, it is a plea for help when met by a difficult situation. Awkward meetings are aided by a quick grab of the mobile and a subsequent browse through the inbox. ?Excuse me for a second, got to reply to this text?. Boring conversations leading to nowhere have become infiltrated with the need to send a quick message: "Help! This guy?s a fucking idiot, he?s got the biggest forehead I?ve ever seen and he won?t leave me alone!"

It is our best friend, our confidante, and our saviour. It has saved lives, set up dates, revealed secrets and affairs, and it is a constant assertion of our individuality and identity.

With it, we are slowly retreating into ourselves. If fear is the greatest tool used to promote a need to consume, then the mobile phone is the greatest expression of this fear. We text because we are afraid. We text when we need comforting. It poetically articulates human restlessness, the need to consume and the need for something other than ourselves. It expresses our hope that maybe, after all, we aren?t really alone.

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