Nov 4th, 2009 at 10:01 am
US Cell Phone Subscriber Trends
One of the few good things you can say about David Brooks’ thesis that SMS has ruined love is that relative to your average “things were better back in the day” crank old man thesis, he’s given us a pretty definitive claim about the source of the problem—text messages are to blame. This chart showing the growth of mobile phone usage in the United States helps set an outer limit on the Death of Romance:
As you can see here, romance died in a staggeringly rapid manner. In the mid-1990s things were fine (as seen in Reality Bites), but by ten years later everything had been ruined.
28 Responses to “US Cell Phone Subscriber Trends”
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November 4th, 2009 at 10:12 am
A friend just had a baby and we noted that he will be a member of the High School Class of 2027. We were laughing at the thought of him one day looking at that weird plug/bracket on the wall in the kitchen and thinking to himself “What the hell could that possibly be for?”
November 4th, 2009 at 10:20 am
Chances Brooks caught his teenage daughter SEXting with Trevor, the dreamy iPhone using lacrosse team captain? I say 1 in 1.
November 4th, 2009 at 10:23 am
Well, I guess we know now what CBS is going to do when Andy Rooney dies.
November 4th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Shorter Brooks: Get off my lawn!
November 4th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Well, if Matt’s going to insist on an egregious misreading of a column, I suppose we should be grateful he doesn’t repeat his offensive rape-is-just-another-choice bit.
November 4th, 2009 at 10:33 am
I own a cheap Italian cellphone, which includes as a feature of its messaging a list of common phrases to insert automatically. Most are along the lines of “How are you,” but there’s also “ti amo sempre” (I love you forever), because apparently Italians routinely need to include that line in their text messages. So there, David Brooks!
November 4th, 2009 at 10:41 am
I guess maybe it’s because I’m in my 30’s and have thus dated before and after cellphones… but the reactionary posts from Matt and Ezra seem just as facile and stupid as Brooks’ “Get Off My Lawn!” article.
November 4th, 2009 at 10:56 am
Reality Bites really spoke to me as a Gen-Xer.
November 4th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Brooks can be relied upon to write laughably stupid things on a regular basis. In fact, I’ve come to believe that one of his prime functions in the world is to provide cover for bloggers who want to slack off for a while and give their critical faculties a rest while still appearing engaged in the stories of the day. Making fun of Brooks’ bleats is just that easy. One expects that a writer of Matt’s intelligence could compose a Brooks-ridiculing post as easily as burping, perhaps while taking a nap. However, overindulgence in the “Brooksie” is tiresome for the readers, since by now we all know Brooks has the brain of a cabbage. (Why point it out again and again?) As tempting as it is, it should be used only in moderation, even with pretty charts.
November 4th, 2009 at 11:18 am
Your kids are what killed the romance. You won’t be humming that Springsteen anthem when the diaper fails to seal up the small of junior’s back, and his outfit can only be removed by pulling it over his head. More likely, you’ll be reminded of a David Brooks column.
November 4th, 2009 at 11:20 am
The hell happened in 2005-2006? Bunch a people got new phones, then said “The hell with it?”
November 4th, 2009 at 11:33 am
This seems like a good opportunity to post my theory that, since courtship these days is mostly carried on via hand-held devices, future generations will certainly develop little tiny pointed fingertips suitable for mashing little tiny buttons. For the same reason peacocks have showy tails.
November 4th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Note how the graph continues the subscriber line at its current rate of growth until it nearly intersects the total population line in a few years. That is not going to happen, if only because small children are highly unlikely to have cell phones.
November 4th, 2009 at 11:54 am
This statement also applies to Winona Ryder’s career. Cell phone usage and texting go up and her career goes down. It looks like more than just mere coincidence if you ask me. When will Brooks write a column covering this vital issue?
November 4th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
[...] and relationship in Mad Men). He also cites the attached visual on the growth of cell-phone use and sarcastically points to the absurdity of arguing for a direct relationship between love’s decline and [...]
November 4th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
@Peter: There are more cars than drivers in this country, so I don’t see why it’s so implausible that there will someday be more phones than users.
November 4th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
“Note how the graph continues the subscriber line at its current rate of growth until it nearly intersects the total population line in a few years. That is not going to happen, if only because small children are highly unlikely to have cell phones.”
Not necessarily true. In the UK, it’s not unheard of for children as young as five or six to have phones. Most European countries have more mobile phones than people.
November 4th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
I don’t trust their polynomial fit. The first two points are 1990 and 1995, while the rest are anual. There is no way a polynomial fit doesn’t have a big kink at 2000, when the scale changes on the x-axis.
November 4th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
I don’t understand the snobbery in this thread. Is the purpose of Matt’s existence only to provide sober analysis on urban transportation infrastructure and trivia on current political affairs? Is there some limit to how much space there is in cyberspace, that demands that Matt make more conservative topic choices? If an older man is going to complain about the courtship rituals of a younger generation, it seems only appropriate for members of that generation to reply in the traditional manner.
November 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
I guess, but responding to a stupid and banal George Will-esque column with stupid and banal commentary is fairly useless. Courtship is certainly different than it was even 10 years ago, and that could be an interesting thing to explore… David Brooks obviously did a terrible job trying to do so, but Yglesias has done an equally terrible job in response… so it’s hard to understand why he is so smug about it.
November 4th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
What the chart shows is the accelerated rate at which our brains are being sucked away into the universe. We did not have a tremendous reservoir of brainpower to begin with, so things look bleak.
And remember, without brainpower it is hard to be romantic. It is hard to choose the right wine and candle configuration to impress your paramour.
Due to excessive cellphone cell phone usage, we are becoming nothing but savage beasts, rooting for wild mushrooms on lonely, windswept plain.
November 4th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
If an older man is going to complain about the courtship rituals of a younger generation, it seems only appropriate for members of that generation to reply in the traditional manner.
With an extended middle finger?
November 4th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
As seen in Reality Bites…
I’m not sure what you could have said to lose more respect than that.
November 4th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
David Brooks should see my sentbox. I am poetic master of the short-message form.
November 5th, 2009 at 12:12 am
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November 5th, 2009 at 2:03 am
Great note,I’ve noticed that, …Nice idea as an article.
November 5th, 2009 at 11:46 am
Has text messaging been around that long? A more effective rebuke to Brook’s piece would be the use of text messages over the past 20 years. Maybe I’m just an incredibly late adopter, but I didn’t really start sending text messages until maybe 4-5 years ago, and I’ve only really started sending a lot of text messages over the past year or so. Of course, I was incredibly late to the IM party, basically skipping over AIM entirely.