A Review of Youth’s Use of Mobile Telephony and its Role in The Deconstruction of Family Communication

Abstract

The mobile telephony has gained momentum and is one of the defining communication technologies of the time. This paper interrogates the adoption of mobile telephony from varied scholars’ perspectives. The insights are from the youth’s uses of this communication technology while looking at how this use has impacted on family communication. The mobile phone is seen to have structured certain interaction behaviors in the youth among them a decreased desire for the face to face interaction. This was observed from the youth’s continued display of addiction to social media. One of the important observations is that that uses of mobile phones to a great extent have altered the way families interact and have generated certain negative interactive behaviors. Nonetheless, this paper does not demonize mobile telephony but implores for appropriate usage of the communication technology. Index Terms- Youth, Mobile Youth Culture, Family Communication, Parental Figures