Cell Phones Are the New Cigarettes When you get in your car, you reach for it. When you're at work, you take a break to have a moment alone with it. When you get into a lift, you play with it. Cigarettes? Cup of coffee? No, it's the third most addictive thing in modern life, the cell phone. And experts say it is becoming more difficult for many people to curb their wishes to hug it more tightly than most of their personal relationships. With its shiny surface, its smooth and satisfying touch, the cell phone connects us to the world even as it disconnects us from people three feet away. It affects us in ways its inventors in the late 1940s never imagined. Dr. Chris Knippers, an expert at the Betty Ford Center in Southern California, reports that the overuse of cell phones has become a social problem not much different from other harmful addictions: a barrier to one-on-one personal contact, and an escape from reality. Sounds 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 in the car, ignoring her husband; the teen who texts messages all the way home from school, avoiding contact with kids all around him. Is it just rude, or is it a kind of unhealthiness? And pardon me, but how is this improving the quality of life? Jim Williams, an industrial sociologist based in Massachusetts, he points to a study by Duke University researchers that found 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, in other words, Williams says studies show that we don't have as many friends as our parents. "Just as more information has led to less wisdom, more acquaintances  through the Internet and cell phones have produced fewer friends," he says. If the cell phone has truly had these effects, it's because it has become very widespread. In 1987, there were only 1 million cell phones in use. Today, almost 300 million Americans carry them. The number of cell phones is far more than that of wired phones in the United States. Which idea does the example of a woman talking on the phone in the car support?
Women use cell phones more often than men. Talking on the phone while driving is dangerous. Cell phones make one-on-one personal contact easy. Cell phones do not necessarily bring people together.