I Want to Be Alone. Please Call Me.

The New York Times > Week in Review > Cellular Sociology: "Sociologically speaking, mobile phones pit the priorities of the 'in' group - those on the phone - against those in the 'out' group, or people in close proximity to the talkers. Ordinary phones, of course, created this dynamic more than a century ago. But mobile phones have extended this exclusivity to places where community used to be the norm - on planes, for example, in conference rooms and in restaurants. Settings previously devoted to eye-to-eye contact and earnest talk are fast turning into venues for shutting out others.

"When you see other people doing things, you think they are doing it for selfish reasons, but when you do it, you feel you are on morally high ground," said James E. Katz, the director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and the author of "Connections: Social and Cultural Studies of the Telephone in American Life" (Transaction Publishers, 1999). "This suggests the elastic nature of people's ability to speak to their motives."