The mobile phone key to empowerment for teenagers?
The mobile phone is now one of the last tangible markers of the transition between childhood and adolescence. Smart Caller have just completed a survey which found that the average age of owning a smart phone is now just 12 years old. If there is now a stop to the declining age of first-time equipment (12 years on average), reflecting concerns expressed in public health, purchasing the first mobile phone by parents is almost an initiation rite to passage to adulthood.
On the one hand, parents who agree to the request of the child in the name of preserving the relational unity within the family circle in a society where time constraints and distance reduces the possibilities of communication. This act of purchase is usually justified on the basis of greater safety of the child:"I know I can call him or he can call me if he needs me" .
Several recent studies have shown that family status influence the possession of a mobile phone. Thus, youth belonging to a single parent or living alternately with their father and their mother are most likely to own a mobile phone while youth from two-parent families are less likely to own a mobile phone.
On the other hand, children who see it as primarily an instrument of emancipation from parental and sesame towards recognition of their peers already have.
It is striking to note that once the young person has appropriated this phone and its contents, it is ringfenced as intimate object vis-à-vis its parents but is in contrast widely shared, exchanged and open for his peers as the very condition for integration into the community.
Therefore, the mobile phone becomes a natural extension of the adolescent who uses it as an affirmation of self with all the highly emotional aspect associated with them as part of a personality under construction. Contravention codes imposed by the adult world as expressed for example very often via camera phones. These are then used for dual purposes which are currently as many means of provocation conscious or unconscious.
