GSM: a friend or a foe

Some years ago, mobile phone was misnomer, because phones were bigger than shoe boxes and cost thousands of dollars.

Today, there are some 1.35 billion mobile phones. In some countries more than half of the population own them and there are mobile phones than fixed phone lines.
There are more mobile phones in use today than as there are Television and Personal Computers combined. This shows that mobile phones are not just a technological marvel but has become a social phenomenon.
The booming sales of mobile phones are a boom to many businesses which makes the mobile phone market is the largest electronic segment ever which explains that more money is spent on mobile phones now than on any other electronic device in the past. Worldwide, mobile phones generate billions yearly for telecommunication companies.
The mobile phone has also created a new language in the short message service(sms) facility. These are written words that users use at a relatively little expense, to type and send brief messages to each other. SMS devotes us an abbreviated form of language that combines letters and numbers to make word sounds. Despite its inconvenience of composing and typing a message, each month about 30 billion messages are exchanged worldwide.
A British study showed that 42% of youths between ages 15 and 26 use sms to flirt, 20% use it to ask a person out on a date, and 13% have used it to end relationships.
Social communicators worry that the mangled spelling and syntax used in sms messages is harming the literacy skills of young one's, others disagree that the sms phenomenon is spurring the revival of writing in a new generation. It is a whole new opportunity to develop a whole new style of language, with combination of text messaging(sms) and the internet means young people are doing a lot more writing and they have to be fluent and articulate enough to pick up the style and master the in-words and code of the genre.
While mobile phones are a useful tools both for socializing and for conducting business with the advent of the internet on the mobile phone. To many these device may sometimes seem like a fetter than a friend, the pressure people feel to respond to mobile phone call no matter where they are or what they are doing is creating a culture of interruptions.
More than just creating annoying intrusions, these ubiquitous device have the potential to become a public enemy. Study shows that using a mobile phone while driving is as dangerous as driving under the influence of alcohol.
Controversy still linger on as whether the radio frequencies emitted from mobile phones and the base stations that relay the signals can cause cancer in humans because hundreds of millions of people are these devices even if only a small percentage were to develop health problems that would translate into a major health risk. Therefore dozens of indepth scientific studies have investigated the effect of mobile phones radiation on living tissue.
Though dogged by controvery, the mobile phone is having a profound impact both economically and socially. Like its electronic cousins- the television and the personal computer- the mobile phone has the potential to be either a useful slave or a demanding master.
The power to determine whether it becomes a FRIEND or a FOE is literally in the hand of the user.