Ring, ring, why don't you give me a calllllllllll????

Not so long ago mobile phones were a commodity to be enjoyed only by the very rich or by those scummy scummy corporate douche bags. You know the kind of guys who would walk around in cheap suits, reeking of Davidoff Cool Water, yelling into their 5kg phones, telling people to "Sell! Sell! Sell!!", so everyone could see them. Ahh now you remember.........


Fast forward to the year 2010 and the mobile screen has become the most dominant screen of the 21st century, often defining a person’s social status. They are extensions of people's personalities, and are often customised according to the user’s individuality. They have become such an important part of our day to day life, that we constantly carry one around, and we have developed reliability on mobile phones as a source of communication. Walk into any public place, and the air is alive with the sounds of mobiles ringing, it is almost impossible to escape it.


The growing popularity of mobile phones, and their excessive use, means that users are often held ransom by their phones in the sense that they incur a social cost of being ‘switched on’ 24 hours 7 days a week. Mobile phones have replaced traditional forms of communication, and there are little to no boundaries of when and were a person can be reached. A person with a business may receive calls from customers outside business hours, an office worker may be called by their boss outside of working hours and asked and thus mobile phones can be seen as a nuisance to their owners.

It is worth noting that mobile phones are not just a device used for communication, advances in technology mean that mobile phones have evolved into cameras, radios, mini computers, mp3 players, video recorders, calculators....... The list is endless, as is our dependence on mobile phones. Mobile phones are seen more of a source of entertainment, whereby users can play video games and watch videos on YouTube, and so they are devices with which users may escape reality.


The latest edition in mobile phones is the 3G, encompassing phones such as the Apple iPhone, where users may surf the web and use social networking applications such as Facebook and Twitter, whereby users are able to record videos and take photos via their 3G phones and post them on the internet for all to see, opening up the door for the latest social cost privacy, and more specifically sexting. Sexting mostly effects teenage girls who send sexual pictures of themselves to others. It has become such a social cost because once an image has been sent there are not limits to the amount of times it can be resent to other individuals or even posted online for the public to see. Celebrities such as Miley Cyrus and Vanessa Hudgens, both of whom are stars of children’s movies, are examples of young teenage girls who have been stung by sexting.

Mobile phones connect indivuals to the world, empower people with a voice and allow people to communicate with one another. Our dependence on our mobiles often comes at a cost, however in this day and age it would be highly problematic not to have one.