Bye Bye Landline, Hello Cell Phone

ABC Senior Producer Stu Schutzman from New York:

An American icon is slowly disappearing. The government says more and more of us–it’s now 18 percent, are dispensing with our land line home phones and going all mobile. No longer can they phone home the old fashioned way to the wired telephone which has been a staple of the American household for more than a century.

Gone is the old familiar ring tone and dial tone, replaced by a movie theme, a rock song or a jazz riff. The government study says that even some cell users who maintain vestigial home phones rarely use them and never answer them. The culprits are mostly twenty something unmarried’s living together in urban environments. My guess is the cell phone, like the internet and video games, is deeply ingrained into a generation of young American’s psyches many of whom seem to need to be connected 24/7–hard to miss a call when you’re literally wearing your phone.

You can’t miss it on most streets these days, pedestrians walking, seemingly in trances, talking or texting on cell phones or glued to their email on blackberries. Are we so self-important that we virtually always need to communicate with someone? I don’t think so. But they’re everywhere, mindlessly crossing a busy intersection while blabbing into thin air via their Blue Tooth or blindly bumping into others equally as lost in cyberspace.

But the cell phone is here to stay and the home phone is definitely on the wane. The trend towards cell phone only households is a rapidly growing global phenomenon which explains why there are some 3.3 billion mobile phones in use around the world — that’s half the earth’s population — just imagine them all in use…at the same time.