Mobile mania has reduced chance of real communication

Ringing mobile phones are the worst form of obtrusiveness during these summer times, writes a switched-off Angela Long.

Did you have a quiet summer? Did you get away from it all? Were it as if the modern world didn't exist?

Or. . . along with the gentle lap of the waves, the tweeting of the birdies, the soundless drift of the clouds, did you hear the trilling of a million ringtones as essential conversations took place all around?

For example:

"He never!!!!"

"Didja see the match?"

"I'm at the beach. . .THE BEACH!"

The mobile presence never leaves you alone, like a four-year-old wanting an ice-cream. In five years Ireland has soared to the top of the world league, the traditional love of chat making us only delira to find a perpetual outlet. Latest figures show the annual spend on mobile use to be around €550, way ahead of our neighbours the Brits.

But, despite the superficial impression of contactability (3.1 million subscribers, in a population of just under four million), we are slowly drifting away from real contact and meaningful conversation. There are many ways to avoid that ringtone or "You've Got Mail" flag. The revolution's end effect could well be to stop us communicating, and give everyone a place to hide from their boss, girlfriend, or mammy.

On the surface of it, we are all tightly wired together, open all hours, ever ready to talk or listen.

Mobiles and emails fly through the atmosphere at a dizzying rate: worldwide, an estimated 11 billion emails are sent each day, and the medium is twice as likely as the phone to be used to communicate at work, according to research by software company Oracle.

But still the protection of answering machines and inboxes manages to keep people as hermetically sealed from unwanted human contact as if in a space capsule orbiting earth.

Consider these examples:

Scenario one: Paddy needs to talk urgently to a business contact in a large organisation.

There is a mobile number, but that is switched off. Paddy rings the large organisation, asks for the contact, with an extension number, and gets a cheery recorded message, "Hello! This is mailbox number 2345. This mailbox has not been enabled. Goodbye." Fuming at the Paddy end of the phone.

Scenario two: Jennifer would like to know what happened to the council's rubbish collection, which did not take place. She calls the council's number, and is put through to the sanitation department. A recorded message explains there were difficulties with the rubbish collection the week before, but there is no information about what happened on that day, or when, in the humid summer weather, the trash will be taken.

Nor is there any opportunity, here or at the switchboard, to ask a question or leave a comment.

Scenario three: Of course, there's always the email, 11 billion messages can't be wrong.

"Here's the email for X, she's very good, she'll get back to you right away!" And you are left swinging in the wind. You don't know if the email has been received and X, safe in Boston, has laughed manically at the thought of such a cheeky slob even expecting a reply.

It was much simpler in the days when you phoned up and the person was there or they weren't. If they weren't there, you had to call back. Now, with all these facades of contact, messages left, recordings, the caller is in a bind. Either you have made contact or you haven't, but it is not clear which.

The next big thing, so the mobile companies aim to convince us, is, in layman's terms, the David-Beckham-at-the-supermarket phone. But then, this facility can also be switched off, so if you don't want people to see your bleary face after a night on the tiles, or to see it at all, your personal access is at the flick of the switch.

Ireland has one of the highest levels of mobile phone ownership in the world, at around 80 per cent penetration. Even in techno-savvy Japan, the comparable figure is in the high sixties.

But look what came lapping at the heels of mobile phone conversations, and has now all but swamped the verbal connection: the Swift Messaging Service, texts. A Danish psychotherapist recently reported treating a "SMS addict", who sent more than 200 texts a day.

Irish phone owners sent over 720 million texts in the past quarter.

Now a lot of these might be for messages that would never have been sent were there not the facility, such as warnings that a friend would be late, or alerts that Cameron had won Big Brother, the sort of essential information that once people did without or waited until the six o'clock news for. But texting, subverting the need to actually speak, has caught on massively.

Hans Geser of the University of Zurich, in Towards a Sociological Theory of the Mobile Phone, quotes a researcher saying: "A main function of face-to-face gatherings is to expose oneself to make new acquaintances and to unforeseen social interaction.

"Cell phones can easily be used to shield oneself from such unpredictable contingencies: by escaping into the narrower realm of highly familiar, predictable and self-controlled social relationships (with close kin or friends), so that the chances of making new acquaintances are reduced."

Despite superficial connectivity, there is little evidence that people are really getting together more. Italian phones researcher Leopoldina Fortunati says: "In reality, we are in a situation of communicative stalemate, as we continually lose the capacity for social negotiation."

More people live alone, and communities crumble as people commute to faraway jobs or sit at their computers all day, living a vicariously "real" life through the Internet.

As American writer and social commentator Robert Putnam has put it, "People don't have friends these days, they watch Friends on television."