A Case Study of Mobile Phones

“Perhaps It Is a Body Part”

How the Mobile Phone Became an Organic Part of the Everyday Lives of Children and Adolescents

A Case Study of Finland

Virpi Oksman and Pirjo Rautiainen

Information Society Research Centre

University of Tampere

Abstract

For Finnish adolescents, mobile culture is a near self-evident fact of life. Finnish teenagers have used mobile phones for a relatively long period of time, and they have embraced them as a natural, fixed and stable part of life. The use of the mobile handset has integrated itself into the way they manage their lives and communicate with others. However, conventions in use and attitudes to the device indicate a number of differences, and in particular children’s relationship to the mobile phone in particular is very different to that of teenagers and adults. Adolescents are by no means a homogenous user group.

1. Introduction

The spread of mobile communication to ever younger age groups continues in Finland, despite the absence of mobile phone marketing targeted to children and their parents. In Finland, the distribution and penetration rate of mobile phones are among the highest in the world. Currently, 85% of Finnish households are in possession at least one mobile phone. Young people have been particularly quick to adopt the mobile phone and the Internet into their lives: in fact, 77% of Finns aged 15 to 19 have the use of a mobile phone (Nurmela et al., 2000). The phenomenon is by no means exclusively urban: regional differences in the distribution of mobile phones are relatively small in Finland.

Today, mobile phones are commonly acquired for children aged 10 to 12. According to City of Helsinki Urban Facts, every third 10-year-old in the Helsinki area owns a personal mobile phone. The relationship between children and mobile communication generates a variety a questions concerning areas such as the suitable age of acquiring a mobile handset, child rearing, use of the mobile phone in schools...