Global Chat Stats
- Just 24 years after the first commercial mobile phone, 69 percent of Americans own one. (The phone took 60 years to reach 80 percent of households.)
- 100 percent of 16- to 24-year-old women in Norway have mobile phones and 70 percent of Norwegian 10-year-olds have them.
- From August 2005 to August 2006, China gained 38 million mobile users.
- The Philippines is the "texting capital of the world," with 100 million texts sent around the archipelago each day.
Lean on Yourself
How to Curb Excessive Dependence in the Electronic Age
With contacts just a call or a few clicks away, those apt to lean on others face an uphill battle if they want independence. Robert Bornstein, a psychologist at Adelphi University and an expert on social dependency, says such people have a helpless self-concept in common. They see themselves as weak, vulnerable, and ineffectual, often because their parents were either overprotective—sending the message that they were fragile—or rigid and authoritarian, which taught them that the way to get along in life was to follow orders. Interestingly, while women show higher levels of dependency than men on written tests, studies of actual behavior wipe out this gender gap.
