[Air-l] cell-phones and statistics

[bromseth]

Nancy Baron wrote:

>I'm looking for current statistics (worldwide and/or by country) on
>comparative use of cells phones for spoken communication versus text
>messaging. Many thanks for any data or sources you might have.

I don't have any statistics myself, but as this is becoming the new evolving 
research field in mediated communication in Norway at the moment, there are 
quite a few new projects that focusses on different aspects of the use of cell 
phones.  Berit Skog at the Department of Sociology at NTNU is leading one of 
these projects (the most established one as far as I know), and I presume
she would know about the statistics if there are any or forward your request 
(berit.skog at svt.ntnu.no).

It is a really interesting question you are asking, and I'd really appreciate 
it if you could post the numbers to the list if you find any. My guess is that 
the differences are huge between countries: in Norway for instance (where I 
come from), "everyone" owns a cell phone (and the majority of children above 
12, creatin a severe gap between the have's and the have not's). The costs for 
using it for regular calls are quite high though (in opposition to the US), 
whereas sending text messages on the other hand is very cheap. Teenagers 
hardly ever use their phones to speak, but as a written kind of medium, and 
several research projects focus on the specific language evolving through cell 
phone text messaging. It will be really interesting to learn more about this 
field in  the years to come! Good luck in your search.

Best regards,
Janne Bromseth