I ran across two stats on phone usage recently that tell me there's a real shift in cultural behavior around phones going on. First, there's the rise of text messaging:

In the fourth quarter of 2007, American cellphone subscribers for the first time sent text messages more than they phoned, according to Nielsen Mobile. Since then, the average subscriber's volume of text messages has shot upward by 64 percent, while the average number of calls has dropped slightly

That's surprising enough - while I use texting, I always wish I had a better way of entering the message. Seems like a lot of people are well past that :) Then I saw this:

More than 32 million American adults have now ditched landlines for cell phones, up from 10 million in 2004, according to a recent federal study. Problem is: the opinions of these people are not captured by current political polling. That’s right, the pollsters don’t call cell phones. As a result of this structural flaw, a giant swath of American opinion is missed and as a result we have no idea where this race for the White House stands today.

The thrust of that article was about polling for the presidential campaign, but leave that aside: 32 million people have no landline here in the US. There's a change. It's now possible to get a phone number (or two or three) once, and never have to change it. For people my age (40's) and older, that's a big change - I've had a different phone number every time I've moved, and it's always been a pain to change all the various records associated with it. For a growing number of people, that problem no longer exists at all.

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