The Impact of Mobile Phones on Peoples’ Lives in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Mobile phone subscriptions have been increasing more and more in Sri Lanka. The usage of this revolutionary communication device started in major cities and then the service has quickly spread to rural areas wherever the network is available. It is true that gender, age, occupation, level of education do not seem as barriers to access mobile services. Many people use mobile phones in positive ways to organize and maintain their social networks. However, there are many negative impacts on human life. Increasing road accidents is one of the dangerous impacts of using mobile phones while driving and walking. This research leads to find the impact of the usage of mobile phones on persons’ life. It aims to investigate whether people really developed their social networks positively while managing their valuable time or their life have been confounded by using mobile phones. Further the study attempted to identify factors which affected the monthly mobile phone bill and also to find out how serious mobile phone dependency has become in Sri Lanka. Two hundred individuals in Maharagama area were interviewed from January to March 2012 for this study. Odd Ratio and Relative Risk were used to identify level of risk of lives becoming perplexed with the use of mobile phone. In addition to that ANOVA technique was applied for the factors identification. In conclusion, most of the people developed their social connectivity through mobile phone usage. People who used mobile phones for complex tasks rather than simple communication face a risk of three times more than those who use it only for simple communication. Further study found that people less than twenty three years have four time risk of failing their daily works than others by using mobile phone. The research result indicated that 92% of respondents could not live as normal without their mobile phones.