Mobile phones enhance lives, present challenges as they become embedded in society
By Lindsay Wielonski
Tim Blakely was on a solo snowboarding trip in the Switzerland Alps in March 2022 when the ground gave way and he fell about 15 feet below the surface, landing on a small ledge. After checking his phone and seeing that he had a 3G connection, he used the five-click SOS function on his iPhone to call emergency services. Although his phone had 3% battery life, he was miraculously able to contact authorities, who saved his life, and was rescued with only a fractured ankle.
“What was so amazing about the technology was that that five-click function just automatically goes to whichever emergency services you're near, so (I) didn’t have to try and remember what the emergency services in Switzerland were,” Blakey said.
Had the incident happened 20 years ago, Blakey would have suffered a much worse fate.
Emergency service functions make up only a fraction of the capabilities of mobile phones. Compared to early 2000s cell phones, today’s devices usually include GPS, fitness trackers and an abundance of free information available to users. But, they can also be sources of non-stop distraction and channels that allow for bullying and constant comparison to others. As mobile phones have become more complex over the years, they’ve changed many areas of life. With each advancement, they’ve become more embedded in society.
In the U.S., the number of people who own cell phones and smartphones has increased. According to a 2022 Pew Research Center report, 97% of Americans own a cellphone of some kind; and 85% of Americans own a smartphone, which rose from 35% in 2011. Some rely on mobile phones for their ability to access the internet. The same Pew Research Center report states that reliance on smartphones for online access is especially common among younger adults, lower-income Americans and those with a high school education or less.
Many people with disabilities rely on mobile phones to aid them with communication on a daily basis. Avi Golden, who lives in Queens, New York, suffered a stroke that left him with aphasia, while he was undergoing heart surgery. He now uses speech-to-text software like Nuance Dragon and Gboard to help him communicate.
Golden said via email that everyone with aphasia is different. For Golden, numbers, names and spelling are especially difficult. He spends about 15 hours per week practicing in speech therapy, and also partakes in outreach to educate others about aphasia.
”So after the stroke, three things: number one, I learn with a speech pathologist every day. Number two, I teach with a speech pathologist, together, to speak about aphasia; with EMS or police or hospitals around the world. And number three, for me, I love to do a lot of disability sports,” Golden wrote.
Although mobile phones improve lives in numerous ways, there’s no denying that they have disadvantages, like contributing greatly to distracted driving. According to the World Health Organization, from 2005 to 2007, 11% of U.S. crashes were due to distractions inside vehicles.
Ryan Pietzsch, an expert on traffic safety for the National Safety Council, said that distractions in a vehicle can be placed into four main categories: cognitive, visual, manual or auditory. “The mobile device can [cause] all four of those distractions,” he said.
Cognitive distractions take a driver’s mind off of the task of driving; visual distractions distract a driver from looking at the road; manual distractions take one’s attention away from operating a vehicle, or pull them away from the seated position. Auditory distractions impair the ability to hear and take away one’s attention while driving.
To address the problem, the City of Tulsa, Oklahoma, recently banned city staff from using mobile phones while driving. Various other cities and U.S. territories have also banned phone use while driving. Washington D.C., Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands all prohibit drivers from using hand-held cell phones while driving, according to the National Conference of State Legislators.
Pietzsch said that it’s important for people to recognize the gravity of distracted driving. “It's so easy to get caught up in life and think that nothing's going to happen to you,” he said. “The most important thing is, out of respect for everyone around you and the safety of everyone in your family, just drive. That's the most important message.”
Increased ownership of cell phones means that more people have access to the internet, and could experience cyberbullying at some point in their lives.
Mobile phones and internet access have made it easy for social circles and social dynamics to persist in any location, not just at school or work – making it easy for cyberbullying to occur.
A 2015 study published in the National Library of Medicine found that cyberbullying was more common among girls. It was also found that sexual-minority students were at a greatly disproportionate risk of cyberbullying victimization. About one third of students who identified as LGBQ reported some type of cyberbullying victimization during the previous year, and LGBQ students were 4.6 times more likely to experience cyberbullying. The analysis was focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual and questioning people, excluding transgender people. Additionally, according to 2018 research from Pew Research Center, 59% of U.S teens have been bullied or harassed online.
Julie Hertzog, director of the PACER Center’s National Bullying Prevention Center in Minneapolis, said that bullying thrives on covertness. “(Bullying) may be happening in places where adults aren't on the phone. That access to reach somebody, at any time, any place, is just so detrimental and so harmful when it comes to those experiencing bullying, because they can never get away from it,” Hertzog said.
Blakey is back in his London home, and back to work as a physiotherapy and health coach. He recalled that on the day of the accident, he had only recently learned about the iPhone five-click SOS function. He knew about the function because an Instagram post about it circulated following the abduction and murder of Sarah Everard in South London in March 2021.
“After that happened, there was an Instagram post or story that went around saying ‘by the way, girls, if you're walking home at night and you're nervous; you don't feel safe, you can click the five-click function.’ And I read that and was like, ‘I didn't know this existed. That's interesting to know,’” Blakey said. “It was hearing about it from that, that I remembered it.”
Technology enables features like GPS and emergency functions, but also hosts a plethora of free information that’s constantly available. Blakey said that in hindsight, he should have further researched the location in the Alps prior to snowboarding.
“I should have done my research. I certainly should have been wearing a GPS tracker – that’s what people wear when they go snowboarding or skiing,” he said. “All that information is right there at our fingertips, and you're a fool like me to not use it.”
Courtesy of Pew Research Center
Social media allows spread of health misinformation online
On the internet, it’s easy for misinformation to spread like wildfire. For instance: an anti-COVID-19-vaccination group on Facebook. The group, called “Anti-Vax,” has about 5,000 followers. Posts in the group range from claims that vaccines cause miscarriages, to political memes, to charts that allege that the COVID-19 vaccine caused an increase in athlete collapses and deaths. One user even claimed that vaccines caused his son to become homosexual.
Although the group’s claims lack evidence, posts in the group get a lot of attention from members. Some posts in the group are blocked by Facebook’s fact-checking service, but many aren’t. Because the group is public, anyone with a Facebook account can access and post in the group.
There’s science behind why misinformation spreads so fast online. A 2018 study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published in Science found that on Twitter, fake news spreads substantially farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than factual news, in all categories of information.
The study analyzed the diffusion of true and false news stories on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. Researchers used six different fact-checking organizations to classify news as true or false. In total, 126,000 stories that were tweeted more than 4.5 million times were considered.
The study found that false news stories are 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories, and that it takes true stories about six times longer to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories. Additionally, it found that fake news was not the fault of bots – the main reason for the spread of misinformation was due to users retweeting false news.
Kate Kohn, disinformation researcher and communications manager for the Federation of American Scientists, said that another major reason that false news spreads faster is because it’s free.
“A lot of what we would consider ‘bad news’ is free to access. How many times do you get to actually read The New York Times before you’re paywalled, versus some guy's blog who is totally making up stories, but it's free,” Kohn said. “You get to read an infinite number of articles, and so you can actually share it with people”
Part of the reason why false stories spread more quickly may be linked to the shock value that is more common among untrue news. False stories are innately more provocative of emotions, which makes people want to talk about them more. That explains why the vaccine’s link to lower rates of COVID-19 deaths might be less shared on Facebook, while news about rumors of horse de-wormer’s potential to cure Coronavirus get attention.
Kohn said that another element that affects the spread of disinformation online is people with credentials who spread information that does not align with the majority or institutional stance within a field.
“If there's a doctor and they're a board-certified physician, but they are making claims that childhood vaccines cause Autism, they’re an expert; they’re a board-certified physician, but that's not an upheld or majority position,” she said.
People who have credentials usually already have some degree of trust from the public, which makes it easier for them to spread an uncommon or unestablished view. Additionally, some people lack media literacy skills that would help them discern the validity of information online.
“It gives the kind of ecosystem of ‘do your own research’ people, research to lean on,” she said. “You're more likely if you see something on that’s written by an MD to be like, ‘Well, a doctor wrote this, so who am I to not trust a doctor?’”