Cell Phones Are the New Cigarettes When you get on a bus, you reach for it. When you're at work, you take a break to have a moment alone with it. When you are waiting for dinner, you play with it.  Cigarette? No, it's another most addictive   thing in the beginning of the 21st century, the cell phone (i.e. the mobile phone). Experts say it is becoming more difficult for many people to curb their wishing to hug it more tightly than most of their personal relationships.  With its charming surface and its satisfying touch, the cell phone connects us even if we are only three feet away. In just the past few years, the cell phone has challenged individuals, employers, phone makers and counselors   in ways that its inventors in the late 1940s never imagined. The costs are becoming even more evident, and I don't mean just the monthly bill. Dr. Chris Knippers, a counselor at the Betty Ford Center in Southern California, reports that the overuse of cell phones has caused a social problem: a barrier  to one-on-one   personal contact. This may sound extreme. But we've all witnessed the evidence: the person at a restaurant who talks on the phone through an entire meal, ignoring his kids around the table; the woman who talks on the phone all the way, ignoring her husband; the teenager who texts messages all the way home from school, avoiding contact with other kids all around him. How is this improving the quality of our life? Jim Williams, an industrial sociologist based in Massachusetts, notes that cell-phone addiction is a symptom   in a widening gulf of personal separation. The study conducted in 2014 notes that one-quarter of Americans say they have no one to discuss their most important personal business with. Despite the growing use of phones, e-mail and instant messaging, we young people don't have as many friends as our parents. "Just as more information has led to less wisdom, more acquaintances   via the Internet and cell phones have produced fewer friends," he says.     (366 words) When was the cell phone probably invented?
in the late 1940s in the beginning of the 21st century in 2014 long before the 1940s