Friends on phones

Switching cellphone carriers can really be hard on teens' relationships these days. "What was set up as a purely business strategy [encouraging customers to talk to people in the same network] is having an unintentional social effect" for better or worse, the New York Times reports. "It is dividing the people who share informal bonds and bringing together those who have formal networks of cellphone “'friends'.” Some parents worry that cellphone friendship groups will replace real-life ones, but one sociologist who's studied this told the Times the mobile ones tend to reflect the real-life ones quite closely (probably more so than friends lists in social Web sites, I would add). So it would follow that losing some phone access to real-life friends - maybe because Mom and Dad switch carriers - would have an effect on one's in-person social life. Some numbers in the article: The age group that talks on the phone most is 18-24 (they send and receive 290 calls/month on average). The group that text messages the most is 13-to-17-year-olds (435 messages a month, on average). "By contrast, cellphone users 45 to 54 years old spoke on the phone 194 times, on average, a month and sent only 57 text messages."