...from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/business/04network.html? pagewanted=2&th&emc=th

What’s Good for a Business Can Be Hard on Friends

By ANGEL JENNINGS Published: August 4, 2007 A month ago, Brandy McDowell sat down with her longtime friend, Kezia Chandler, and told her she had switched cellphone carriers. Their relationship has not been the same since.

Now, they barely speak. Ms. Chandler rushes Ms. McDowell off the phone when she calls during her lunch break. And long conversations about schoolwork and relationship woes have been reduced to sound bites.

Maybe they should blame the cellphone carriers. The carriers, after all, set up plans that encourage subscribers to talk mainly to people in the same network. The companies say they are simply trying to recruit and retain customers.

But what was set up as a purely business strategy is having an unintentional social effect. It is dividing the people who share informal bonds and bringing together those who have formal networks of cellphone “friends.”

That is most true for people younger than 25 because they are the ones who see the cellphone as an extension of themselves. They are constantly sending text messages, making calls, checking the time, scheduling appointments, calculating math, taking photos, playing games or looking up something on the Internet.

Those who talk the most on the phone are ages 18 to 24, according to a study of cellphone use by Telephia Inc., a San Francisco research firm that follows cellphone trends. In the first quarter of 2007, this group sent and received on average 290 calls a month, the study found. Text messaging was highest, Telephia said, among 13- to 17- year-olds, who averaged 435 messages a month.

By contrast, cellphone users 45 to 54 years old spoke on the phone 194 times, on average, a month and sent only 57 text messages.

David S. Hachen, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame who looked at cellphone use and its effects on people’s relationships, said he had found that cellphone networks tend to be a reflection of friendship networks.

“Friendship networks,” he said, “tend to be larger in younger groups, but they have weaker ties with those they talk with. But as they get older, the networks are smaller and they have stronger ties.”

Some experts worry that cellphones will replace face-to-face contact, said Scott Campbell, who teaches communication studies at the University of Michigan.

But after he conducted research on the impact of cellphones on social networks, Mr. Campbell said he concluded that cellphones actually enhanced the bonds between users.

“Who young people talk to says something symbolically about who they are tied to,” Mr. Campbell said in an interview. “And who they are talking to the most are their close friends.”

Rich Ling, a sociologist at Telenor’s communication research institute in Norway, who wrote a book on cellphone use called “The Mobile Connection: The Cellphone’s Impact on Society,” added that cellphones blur the lines of when an encounter starts and when it ends.

“Young people are not just talking for two hours, but they are continually connecting through the day,” he said. He cited the young couple who send text messages and call each other all day to set up details of a date. “When does the date start, or does it start when they are sending messages back and forth?”

Mr. Campbell describes text messaging as the equivalent of passing notes in class, though they are more fragmentary and more frequent.

“A lot of people think these messages are meaningless, but they are actually symbolic gestures of friendship,” he said.

Unlike traditional landline telephones, which once made callers distinguish between local and long distance, cellphone carriers divide the world into in-network and outside. And because basic plans from the three major cellphone carriers, Verizon, Sprint and AT&T, are all about the same price — under $60 a month — the deciding factor for young people, in particular, is what network friends are on.

Carriers are giving customers more options to stay connected with people outside their network. This year, T-Mobile introduced a plan that allows customers to choose five telephone numbers outside its network that they can call free at any time. Sprint offers night minutes that start at 7 p.m., two hours earlier than competitors.

“We are trying to avoid restricting customers to just people on their network,” said a Sprint spokeswoman, Emmy Anderson.

But while these plans may allow callers to talk free, the person receiving the call is still using daytime minutes.

Steve Bufford, 24, of Manhattan, said he constantly monitored his out- of-network minutes. And he had to cut back on conversations with a few of his friends — “until the weekends, then we become the best of friends in the world,” he said.

As for Ms. McDowell and Ms. Chandler, the two who rarely talk on the phone now, they say they visit each other more.

“We used to talk every day all day,” said Ms. McDowell, a 21-year-old student at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. “Now I only hear from her after 9 p.m. so she doesn’t use her minutes.”

In the cellphone world, minutes mean money, a lesson young adults say they quickly learn when they move off the family plans and sign their own contracts. While they once talked freely when their parents paid the bill, they become penny pinchers when they have to pay their own way.

Elisa Joris, 23, of Walled Lake, Mich., said that was exactly what happened to her. She became a Sprint customer in high school when her mother added her to the family plan. Now, seven years later, she stays with the carrier because the people she talks to the most — her brother, her former boyfriend and best friends — are all on the network.

Ms. Joris said that because she no longer shared minutes with her parents, she signed up for the plan with the lowest cost even though it had the fewest minutes. For $30 a month, she gets 300 daytime minutes, but it is the free calling within the network that makes the plan a real bargain.

In June, she used only 200 of those peak-hour minutes. But, she said, she spent more than 800 minutes on the phone with other Sprint customers.

“I have seen bills where I have used 1,500 minutes,” she said. “I try not to talk to those who don’t have Sprint. I don’t have minutes to waste.”

And while her attitude has yet to affect her relationships in a negative way, Ms. Joris said it had brought her closer to someone she now considered a friend who might have been an acquaintance if she were on another network.

“One reason she talks to me more than her other friends is because we both have Sprint,” she said.

Some cellphone users say they have found a way to change carriers without losing touch with friends. As they switch to new companies, they try to encourage their friends to move with them. Ms. McDowell said she followed her friends as they hopped around.

In high school, she said, all her friends had the T-Mobile Sidekick — the sleek, palm-size phone with a full keypad. So she signed a two- year contract with the cellphone provider so she could send them text messages at no cost.

Then in college, she said she and her friends switched to Nextel so they could “chirp” to each other on their walkie-talkie phones.

Last month, she returned to T-Mobile after everybody in her circle migrated back for the new Sidekick 3.

Her friend, Ms. Chandler, got lost after the second move. She still has Sprint, now part of Sprint Nextel, but she said she planned to leave once her contract expired. Ms. McDowell persuaded her to move to T-Mobile.

“As soon as I can, I am on my way,” Ms. Chandler said.