Mobile phones as life and thought companions

ABSTRACT

According to adults who ban adolescent interactions with mobile phones in Chinese high schools, students ‘addicted’ to mobile phones lack will power and schools without a restrictive policy on mobile phone use among students on campus are ‘poor’ in quality. Upon analysis of data from 45 semi-structured interviews with second-year high school students from urban, rural, and Tibetan regions of China, this study finds that the consequences of mobile phone use are not always pre-determined. Teens do not merely use their phones to connect; they also treat them as ‘life’ and ‘thought’ companions, which they invest with feelings and thoughts that animate life experiences and catalyse healthy development. The wholesale ban on mobile phone use in school is destined to fail and risks blinding parents and educators to potential benefits the technology has to offer, for it overlooks the value of mobile phones as objects of ‘passion’ and ‘reason’, ignores the opportunity to engage with teens who make visible online the problems they struggle with offline, and disregards the need for empathic imagination.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescent
• care
• China
• high school
• smartphone
• wellbeing

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge a generous Durham Doctoral Fellowship, without which the study would not have been possible. I am also thankful to Professor Steve Higgins of Durham University for his supervision of the research project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Durham University Doctoral Fellowship.

Notes on contributors

ZhiMin Xiao

Dr ZhiMin Xiao is a Lecturer in Educational Data Science at the University of Exeter. Motivated by social problems such as unequal access to education and inequality in health and wellbeing, ZhiMin is interested in educational programmes that unbar the gate without lowering the bar and, research projects that hold promise to help solve or re-solve the problems through improved data analysis and effective storytelling.