That would make you a mighty fine cocktail, my friend.
I’d be interested to know what role economics and technology play in this discrepancy.
I teach at a university, so i work in an environment where there are hundreds, thousands of young people around all the time. Nearly all of my students have smartphones, and hardly any of them ever seem to actually talk on their phones. They use their phones to communicate using text messaging, either through the phone’s native app, or through something like Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, or whatever.
I’ve seen people on these boards make similar observations about their own smartphone use, along the lines of, “I never answer my cellphone. Just text me.”
Your survey was from 2010, when smartphones were around, but there wasn’t the number of cheap and secondhand smartphones available that there are today. If you’ve got an old dumb phone, with a regular keypad, you might be more inclined to use it for talking than for texting.
If blacks are, on average, poorer than whites (is anyone going to argue that this isn’t the case?), then maybe they have lower smartphone ownership numbers. Also, among poorer groups, it’s possible that people figure that they need to have a cellphone, but are willing to forego a home phone in order to save money. Those people would, as a consequence, talk more on their cellphones.
Anyway, according to a sophisticated UCLA research study, it’s Asians who are always using their cellphones. ![]()
nm
I try not to pay attention to peoples’ cell phone use as it usually pisses me off (yes, I have a cell phone) so I can’t speak to the OP’s observation but before cell phones were popular I noticed that the black women at work were constantly on personal phone calls. Perhaps you’ll say it was confirmation bias - perhaps it was. But in a contained atmosphere where you can see what everyone is doing, and what they’re doing impacts you directly you tend to pay close attention. I sometimes thought to myself that perhaps because they were the minority of the group they felt they needed to keep their families close, as allies of a sort. I don’t know how to word that in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a dick but what I’m trying to say is that I was looking at the situation sympathetically, if that makes sense.