Culture and customs

Culture and customs


In less than twenty years, the mobile telephone has gone from being rare, expensive equipment of the business elite to a pervasive, low-cost personal item. In many countries, mobile telephones outnumber land-line telephones; in the U.S., 50 percent of children have mobile telephones.[12] In many young adults' households it has supplanted the land-line telephone. The mobile phone is banned in some countries, such as North Korea.[13]


Given the high levels of societal mobile telephone service penetration, it is a key means for people to communicate with each other. The SMS feature spawned the "texting" sub-culture.[citation needed] In December 1993, the first person-to-person SMS text message was transmitted in Finland. Currently, texting is the most widely-used data service; 1.8 billion users generated $80 billion of revenue in 2006 (source ITU).


Many telephones offer Instant Messenger services for simple, easy texting. Mobile phones have Internet service (e.g. NTT DoCoMo's i-mode), offering text messaging via e-mail in Japan, South Korea, China, and India. In Europe, 30–40 per cent of internet access is via mobile telephone. Most mobile internet access is much different from computer access, featuring alerts, weather data, e-mail, search engines, instant messages, and game and music downloading; most mobile internet access is hurried and short.


Currently, the mobile telephone is a fashion totem custom-decorated to reflect the owner's personality. This aspect of the mobile telephony business is, in itself, an industry, e.g. ringtone sales exceeded $5 billion in 2006, per Informa