Cell phones are the new cigarettes

When you get in your car, you reach for it. When you're at work, you take a break to have a moment alone with it. When you get into an elevator, you fondle it.

Cigarettes? Cup of coffee? Nope, it's the third most addictive substance in modern life, the cell phone. And experts say it is becoming more difficult for many people to curb their longing to hug it more tightly than most of their personal relationships.

With its shiny surfaces, its sleek and satisfying touch, its mysteries and air of sophistication, the cell phone connects us to the world even as it disconnects us from people three feet away. In just the past couple of years, the cell phone has challenged individuals, employers, manufacturers and therapists in ways its inventors in the late 1940s never imagined.

The costs are becoming ever more evident, and I don't mean just the monthly bill. Dr. Chris Knippers, a counselor at the Betty Ford Center in Southern California, reports that the overuse of cell phones has become a social problem for tens of thousands of Americans not much different than other harmful addictions: an obstacle to one-on-one personal contact, and an escape from reality.

Sounds extreme, but we've all witnessed the evidence: The guy at a restaurant who talks on the phone through an entire meal, ignoring his kids around the table. The woman who yaks on the phone in the car, ignoring her husband. The teen who text-messages all the way home from school, avoiding contact with kids all around him.

Is it just rude, or is it a pathology? And pardon my own manners, but what's the investment angle?
Farewell, friends
Jim Williams, an industrial sociologist based in Massachusetts, notes that cell-phone addiction is part of a set of symptoms in a widening gulf of personal isolation. He cites a study by Duke University researchers that found one-quarter of Americans say they have no one with whom to discuss their most important personal business. Despite the growing use of phones, e-mail and instant messaging, in other words, Williams says studies show that we don't have as many pals as our parents. "Just as more information has led to less wisdom, more acquaintances via the Internet and cell phones have produced fewer friends," he says.

If the mobile phone has truly had these effects, it's because it has become incredibly pervasive. Consider that as recently as 1987, there were only 1 million cell phones in use. Today something like 200 million Americans carry them. Almost three-quarters of American households have at least one, and many have three to five. About half of teens aged 13 to 16 have one. They far outnumber wired phones in the United States.