Are mobile phones a positive addiction?

In the rural reaches of their natural habitat, Finland, they are as common as watches. Now, urgent buzzing, digitalised Tchaikovsky, and one-sided conversations saturate city soundscapes worldwide, adding to the inescapable sensory battering of the city dweller's daily experience.

Yet most research into mobile phone use has been about the possible negative health effects of radiation. What about the social implications? Are mobile phones just superficial and harmless technological tools, or do they have more profound effects on those who use them - and those who do not?

In one of the first studies of its kind into attitudes about mobile phones, psychologist Simon Cassidy, of Britain's University of Salford, is trying to find out. His initial findings are that among the 25-year-old British students he studied, mobile phones trigger powerful, mostly very positive reactions about the personality and image of the user. His findings also led him to formulate the idea of mobile phone use as a 'positive addiction'. What is interesting is that they trigger equally negative reactions in other populations.

Mobile phone use, Mr Cassidy said, can be regarded as comparable to other socially significant phenomena, like smoking or drinking. This link is important because there may be a hydraulic element to the relationship: one study he cites suggests that increased mobile phone ownership among adolescents may be directly associated with a decrease in smoking.

The logic here is that, particularly among the young, using a mobile phone may get you the same sort of 'street cred' that smoking does.

Most of Mr Cassidy's participants thought of mobile phone users as popular, sociable, attractive to the opposite sex, successful and contemporary. The only negatives were that they were perceived as not caring about the environment - not a prominent concern among the majority of conspicuous consumers - and that they followed others, which could be interpreted as being fashionable.

It may only be a matter of time before the use of cellphones in public arouses the kind of objections that smoking has. In Japan, where they are far less common than in Hong Kong, a backlash is already well established, according to the Washington Post.