An exasperated suitor was on the brink of breaking up with Denise Lyons*, a 30-year-old writer. He recently told her, "The problem with you is that you are a people person—with the emphasis on the plural." Each time they were ostensibly alone, Lyons was electronically tied to others. She writes and receives about 1,200 text messages a month—anything from "I feel fat today," to "Want to go to a party tonight?" to "Can you help rewrite this sentence?" At the office, she's often simultaneously working, instant-messaging one friend, and chatting on the phone with another. Many a night, she falls asleep next to her laptop. But doesn't she prefer a face-to-face encounter to an e-mail exchange or fuzzy cell-phone chat? "That's like asking if someone prefers sons or daughters!" she says. "They are equally fulfilling. They're just differently fulfilling."

The ubiquity of cell phones has dramatically increased the number of "grooming calls," nonessential expressions of concern, support, and love, according to Leysia Palen, a computer scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. And mobile communications have caused a social revolution by turning individuals, not places, into home bases. It's enabled what Richard Ling, the world's foremost mobile-communications expert and senior researcher at Telnor, a telecommunications firm in Norway, calls "micro-coordination," or arranging plans on the fly. This trend allows more spontaneity and flexibility.

But flipping open the phone as soon as a bad mood bubbles up or a question comes to mind may be making you less independent, and unable to tap your inner resources and experience life's contrasts more fully. That's the conclusion of Hans Geser of the University of Zurich, who reviewed 100 papers on the psychology, sociology, and history of cell-phone use. Geser argues that we use these "pacifiers for adults" to instantly quell the tiniest flicker of loneliness or uncertainty. "Human existence is enriched by longing or homesickness, by experiences of anxious insecurity about what others may be doing. Cell phones tend to level out such emotional oscillations, by making farewells less dramatic because we can always keep in touch and by dissipating the thrill and bliss connected with seeing each other again," he says. (Just imagine if Bogart had texted Bergman a few minutes after he declared, "We'll always have Paris.")

The superconnected may develop a dual-dependency, says Robert Bornstein, a psychologist at Adelphi University in Long Island. They're not only counting on other people too much; they're also hooked on the devices themselves, sometimes to the point where they feel utterly disconnected, isolated, and detached without them. "I develop a weird itch if I haven't checked e-mail for 24 hours," Lyons says. And yet she was surprisingly calm when a robbery left her sans cell for four days—it was as though she had been sent on a monastic retreat.

Just as some people are unusually drawn to the illicit lure of gambling or drinking too much, some may be particularly likely to grasp onto electronic umbilical cords. Lyons has been a social butterfly (and a multitasker) since her early childhood: "I have a natural genetic compulsion to interact," she says. "And I've been accused of 'alt-tabbing' my way through life."

But it could be that humans are in fact well suited to the wireless age. "Whenever there is a new technological advancement, people automatically want to think about how it could be bad for us," says Kate Fox, a social anthropologist and director of the Social Issues Research Center in Oxford, England. "I take a different perspective: If this is so popular, what sort of deep-seated need is it fulfilling?"

Because cell phones simulate the conditions once necessary to the development of relationships—physical proximity and stable dwelling places—new communication patterns are actually very old. "We long lived in very small communities where grooming talk was natural," Fox says. Since families have scattered while throngs of strangers coexist in cities, cell phones are "an antidote to the alienation of modern urban life." The downsides, Fox points out, resemble the disadvantages in village living. "There is no privacy, you can't get away from family and friends, and you can start to feel claustrophobic."

In another nod toward our tribal past, Ling and colleagues argue that cell-phone communication strengthens in-group relationships. Think of teenage clique members who keep each other abreast of their situations, down to what color socks they are wearing. The danger here, Ling speculates, is that if your in-group is too tightly connected, there is no room left for secondary connections—acquaintances that can lead to new jobs, romances, and perspectives.

Lyons says the biggest drawback to her hyperconnected lifestyle is not a lack of solitude but the way in which her in-the-flesh friends sometimes feel lonely in her presence while she's buried in her Treo. But perhaps she's learning to look up from her screens and into their eyes a bit more: A few months after her friend admitted feeling second-best to disembodied messages, she reports: "We're actually doing better now. I started to pay attention to him."

* denotes names changed

• 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.

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.

Bornstein says the trick to moderating excessive dependency is to seek out support mindfully, not reflexively. "First, gain some understanding of what sorts of events trigger dependent feelings and impulses. There is nothing wrong with calling up a friend or a spouse to seek advice, but don't ask others to take over for you in stressful times."

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