"Approximately 20 percent of American teens (more girls than boys) own a cellular phone.  Cellular phones are more popular in European countries than they are in the United States--with nearly 2/3 of Europeans owning a phone, compared to only about 1/4 of Americans."

(Source: Marshall Brain and Jeff Tyson, "How Cell Phones Work," p. 8, from verizon.com: http://www22.verizon.com/about/community/learningcenter/articles/displayarticle1/0%2C4065%2C1008z8%2C00.html, accessed 27 December 2001.)

"Today the ringing of the telephone takes precedence over everything. It reaches a point of terrorism, particularly at dinnertime."

(Source: Niels Diffrient, New York Times, 16 Oct 1986, in James B. Simpson, comp., Simpson's Contemporary Quotations, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988, www.bartleby.com/63/. [27 December 2001].)

Family life suffers when materialism triumphs.  The way in which the pursuit of wealth hurts family life stands out in a new study recently published in Social Indicators Research by a team of psychologists at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia.  Analyzing data collected from 162 Australian adults, the Murdoch scholars limned a "negative relationship" between a commitment to materialistic goals and the cultivation of satisfactory domestic relationships. 

Statistical tests established a strongly inverse relationship between "materialism" on the one hand and "family life" on the other (p < .001).  The data yielded a similarly negative relationship between materialism and "amount of fun and enjoyment," and between materialism and "life as a whole."

The Australian scholars interpret their findings as evidence that "high materialists place possession acquisition foremost in their value hierarchy, ahead of many other values such as family and interpersonal relationships."  Quite possibly, they reason, "for the materialist, possessions serve as 'surrogates' for inadequate interpersonal relationships.  Hence, their lower satisfaction with 'family life' and 'amount of fun and enjoyment' may be due to the greater emphasis they place on possessions and time spent acquiring possessions than on cultivating family relationships and having time for fun and enjoyment."

Apparently, material possessions make poor substitutes for good family relationships and good experiences: among the materialists surveyed in this study, the Murdoch researchers see dissatisfaction with poor family life and an impoverished recreational life resulting in "'spillovers' into feelings about 'life as a whole.'"

(Source: Lisa Ryan and Suzanne Dziurawiec, "Materialism and Its Relationship to Life Satisfaction," Social Indicators Research 55[2001]: 185-197.)