Literature Review

Aykac 2008 argues that cell phones are “disruptive and distractive” and that they have no use in the educational environment, however Castells 2006 notes that the new language brought about by having to summarise text in SMS text messages sparks creativity in the younger generations. Castells goes on to cite Fortunati 2003, the action of texting makes adolescents discover “the attraction of the written word”. Hale, Poulter and Whiteside 2005 state that a third of British schools have a mobile phone mast within 200 meters and go on to say their findings come “days after Government experts warned of a genuine radiation risk to young brains, particularly in children of primary school age.” On the other hand an Ofcom report cited on the World Health Organisation Fact sheet 304, 2006 explains that “Ofcom has performed over 500 measurements around masts, predominantly near schools and hospitals. The highest radiofrequency emission level recorded was 1/279^th of the ICNIRP guidelines.”

Reimer 2006 cites Chelsey that mobile phones have lead to an increased level of spill over between work and home and has noted that this has had negative effects to family life. Interestingly, Reimer went on to describe how the mobile phone is increasing gender inequalities at work as women were more often contacted by children or family than men. Devitt and Roker 2006 find that mobile phones play an important part in family life and allow children to gain independence whilst the parents still have an element of control through the mobile phone. Older children use the mobile phone for a courtesy text/call to worried parents. They also find that the parents prefer to physically hear their child’s voice whereas children prefer to text.

“Developing countries are driving an explosion in global mobile phone use” says Tryhorn 2009 who then carries on to say that from 2002 to 2007 mobile phone usage increased by about 3 billion users, two thirds of which was accounted for by developing countries. Tryhorn compared this to a modest increase of only 0.27 billion using landlines over the same period, suggesting that developing countries are skipping straight to mobile technology. Oxfam 2007 shows that mobile phone coverage in developing countries is still not excellent with mainly the big towns and cities having coverage and that people still may need to rely on a satellite phone, which is more expensive.