Cellphones And Social Norms

Cellphones have come a long way in popularity and use since they came out. But how we use them today has affected society on a grander scale. The purpose of this essay is to prove how cellphones have impacted social norms. To be more specific, how the line between personal and work life has been blurred. A closer look into how everyday aspects of our lives have changed due to cellphones, as well as how work and school life has changed will support this point. First of all, cellphones have affected the norms of which we carry out daily activities in our personal lives. The way we communicate and travel are two examples of daily necessities that have been altered by the exposure of cellphones. The instant and constant communication that cellphones …show more content…
Before the 20th century, work life and personal life were one unit as most work took place in farms and were supported by family and neighbors. Eventually, jobs were created further away from home and separated the two. The introduction of cellphones is a way to modify social norms by merging personal/ family life and work life without being within the same vicinity (Gant & Kiesler, 2002, p.121). Cellphones have been found to allow people to be less bound by work hours, and have the liberty to keep in touch with whomever if needed (Gant & Kiesler, 2002, p.129). Work has been noticed to have become more and more mobile (Churchill & Munro, 2001, p.7). This mobility leaves people with the freedom of exploring mixed-use places. Cellphones allow further blending of the physical and virtual world (Churchill & Munro, 2001, p.6), and depending on the job, it can blur the lines even more. At this point, the only way to prevent the mixing of two worlds is to shut down one and put complete focus into either one’s personal life or workplace. The norms of where we work and how we think of working has changed (Churchill & Munro, 2001, p.8), and we can see this with cellphone-use within college students. Cellphones have grown to be quite popular amongst students. Out of 235 students taken into consideration for a recent study, 99.6% of them had a cellphone and amongst those students who had cellphones, 58.5% of them specified that they text in class (Pettijohn, Frazier, Rieser, Vaughn, & Hupp-Wilds, 2015, pp.513-514). The use of cellphones in classrooms have become the new norm and an increasing problem. Attitudes have changed within the society, especially among the youth, as to where it is most suitable to use cellphones (Pettijohn et al., 2015, p.513). For young students, it is socially acceptable to use their phones in class. But cellphones