‘Where are you?’ Cell phones and environmental self-understanding amongst students

Abstract

Nowadays, the cell phone is omnipresent in our society, certainly amongst youngsters. Its presence, and the possibility to be in constant touch, have some profound consequences on our experience (of our selves, of others and the world) and self-understanding. It is important for educators and scholars in the field of education to understand such consequences and develop an awareness of how students relate to the world they inhabit. Starting from the observation that people often want to know the position of the party they call, this explorative study reports on an analysis of text messages of 10 participants and tries to couple this and related questions heuristically to an environmental self-understanding, wherein a particular environmental kind of positioning becomes a major need and/or obsession. Results point to a particular potential dealing with the present and the future.

Keywords:

• cell phones
• SMS
• students
• where are you
• environmental self-understanding

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. The main reasons they gave were either the lack of memory, which apparently compelled them to delete messages of the outbox rather than messages stored in the inbox, or the inability of some cell phones to store sent messages (and instead just storing a report of these sent messages).

2. The presupposition is here that in- and outgoing messages are, for our interests, similar enough. This reasoning is justifiable because: (1) the inboxes of people consist an sich of the outgoing messages of other people, and (2) we explicitly do not want to distinguish different patterns among in- and outgoing messages, but rather unveil clusters that apply to all messages at once.

3. All the text messages are translated as accurately as possible from Dutch. Names and places are always pseudo-names and pseudo-places, in order to guarantee the privacy and anonymity of the respondents in question.

4. What is very remarkable with this group of text messages is that they are often sent spontaneously: without someone having asked, one often gives a certain hint of positioning toward another party.

5. A gradual decline in the prevalence of the last-mentioned items was noted. Text messages that deal some way or another with appointments made or modified the same day are more frequently found in in- and outbox, than appointments in the very near future which, in turn, are more prevalent than items which deal with a further future and/or past (same day: 66 out of 494 items; very near future: 34 out of 494 items; further future and/or past: 16 out of 494 items).