<nettime> Cell Phones Are the New Peacock Feathers

["nettime's_roving_reporter" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2000/11/
 14/MN79565.DTL>

     Cell Phones Are the New Peacock Feathers, Study Reports
     Attracting females is apparently what it's really about

     Natalie Angier, New York Times 
   
   "Is that a cell phone you're taking out of your pocket? Well, then,
   I'm glad to see you!"
   
   That, it seems, is the fondly imagined fantasy the ambitious young
   lads of Liverpool, who, a new study shows, regard their mobile phones
   less as practical business tools than as handy little mate lures.
   
   Observing patrons at an upscale pub frequented by lawyers,
   entrepreneurs and other single professionals, researchers from the
   University of Liverpool discovered that men had a markedly different
   relationship to their cell phones than women.
   
   Not only did significantly more men than women appear to own cell
   phones, but they clearly wanted everybody else to know they owned
   them, too.
   
   Whereas the women in the pub generally kept their phones in their
   purses and retrieved them only as needed, the men would take their
   phones out of their jacket pockets or briefcases upon sitting down and
   place them on the bar counter or table for all to see.
   
   Lest they be overlooked, the men fiddled with them often, picking them
   up, moving them here or there, checking to be sure the battery was
   charged.
   
   As the researchers see it, the men are using their mobile phones as
   peacocks use their immobilizing feathers and male bullfrogs use their
   immoderate croaks: To advertise to females their worth, status and
   desirability.
   
   The study, which appears in the current issue of the journal Human
   Nature, shows how new technology subserves primal impulses --
   specifically, the impulse to strut.
   
   It also suggests that the breathless evolution of today's technology
   is driven, not merely by scientific innovations or the demand for
   heightened worker productivity, but by the social need of people to
   find novel ornaments and status symbols that distinguish them from the
   pack.
   
   Pulling no punches, John Lycett and Robin Dunbar of the Center for
   Economic Learning and Social Evolution, entitle their report, "Mobile
   Phones as Lekking Devices Among Human Males."
   
   In nature, a lek is a communal mating area where males gather to
   engage in flamboyant courtship displays, and females stroll by to
   judge the performers and presumably choose the fittest, most
   resourceful or most amusing of the lot.
   
   Hammer-head bats, sage grouse, bowerbirds, walruses, Ugandan kob and
   fallow deer are among the species that engage in a lekking-style
   courtship system. And so, too, it seems, do some humans, at least in
   the pubs of Liverpool.
   
   "This is quite an interesting paper," said Dr. Geoffrey Miller, an
   evolutionary psychologist at UCLA and the author of "The Mating Mind."
   Mobile phones are a "clever positional good," he said, a positional
   good being something that marks one's social position.
   
   "The phones have an ostensible purpose, an excuse for carrying them
   around," Miller said. If somebody brought a laptop computer into bar
   and started clicking away on it, even though it might be 20 times more
   expensive, it would be considered really tasteless to be seen using it
   in a bar."
   
   On the other hand, a person who pulls out a phone and starts yakking
   away on it looks for all the world like a smooth operator -- even when
   that phone is phony. Lycett said that the new study was inspired by
   newspaper accounts of how,
   
   when night clubs in South America began requiring patrons to check
   their cell phones at the door, it was discovered that a huge
   percentage of the phones were fake.
   
   "At the same time, stores in the U.K. were selling fake mobile phones,
   and some were quite sophisticated -- they even would ring and light
   up," said Lycett, in an interview on a conventional telephone. "We
   wondered, Why would anybody buy a fake phone?" The researchers also
   had casually noticed that men seemed to play around with their phones
   more than women did, prompting them to wonder if there were sex
   differences in cell phone behavior.
   
   They chose to study the behavior formally in a pub, which is the
   center of social life in Britain, and to focus on professionals, a
   socioeconomic group with the means and presumed need to own cell
   phones.
   
   Attending the same pub on 23 evenings over a four-month period, the
   researchers, financed through a grant from the university, discreetly
   kept track of all patrons who sat at the pub's 13 tables.
   
   They recorded who obviously had a phone -- that is, used it or
   displayed it - - and how he or she handled the phone. Over their study
   period, 54 percent of the pub patrons were men. Of the men, 32 percent
   were recorded as possessing a cell phone, whereas only 13 percent of
   the women did.
   
   "It's possible that more women had phones than this and we never saw
   them, but that goes to the heart of what we're saying: That there's a
   gender difference in the way they're displayed and used," said Lycett.
   
   The researchers noted also that the amount of time the men spent
   toying with and displaying their phones increased significantly as the
   number of men relative to women increased, rather as male peacocks fan
   open their feathers more vigorously the greater the number of
   competing suitors in view.
   
   Whether the exhibiting of a cell phone ever worked as a male courtship
   display -- that is, whether it attracted any women -- the researchers
   could not determine.
   
   Miller pointed out that, as status symbols go, cell phones were not
   mere indicators of one's bank account, as a Rolex watch or a Jaguar
   roadster might be. "What's being displayed here is not so much wealth
   as social importance, and the fact that you're plugged into a social
   network and are important enough to be able to be reachable all the
   time," he said.
   
   That association, said Miller, could explain why cell phones are
   status symbols not merely for young male barristers in Liverpool, but
   also for, say, female adolescents in Southern California.
   
   "Teenage girls have a high variation in the size of their social
   networks, which they love to advertise, particularly to other girls,"
   he said. "It's a form of female-female competition."
   
   Such tele-competition may even be healthy -- for girls and boys alike.
   In the current issue of The British Medical Journal, Clive Bates and
   Anne Charlton of the Action on Smoking and Health organization in
   London posit a link between recent declines in smoking rates among
   British adolescents, and the concomitant rise in the number of
   teenagers who own cell phones.
   
   The researchers point out that cell phones, like cigarettes, keep the
   hands, mouth and weekly allowance well occupied, and that both objects
   satisfy a pubertal desire to appear mature, worldly, involved,
   indifferent, rebellious, ambitious, autonomous, fashionable and fully
   peer-bonded.
   
   Fashion, though, is a ruthless slave master. Lycett said that, since
   his data were collected a couple of years ago, basic cell phones have
   become comparatively cheap and practically universal. Hence, the
   pressure is on to own a cell phone with the largest suite of
   extraneous features and, paradoxically, the smallest dimensions.
   
   But small does not mean invisible or unlekkable. Small means -- you
   need a headset to go with it! Now if only somebody could figure out
   how to rig up a pair of antlers to this thing!
   
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