Kids’ New Calling Plan: The Party Line Returns
Emily McQueen, 12, couldn’t figure out the math problem. So she called her friends Jasmine and Christina. Jasmine then called her friend Terryn, and Christina called her friend Darrius. They all tried to answer Emily’s question--during the same telephone call.
Youngsters from Los Angeles to Washington are communicating regularly with their friends using three-way conference call features to link as many as 10 people in one telephone call. They talk about everything from tomorrow’s homework to who’s dating whom to what movie to see Saturday night.
“It’s more fun to talk to a group,” said Emily, a seventh-grader in the Washington suburb of Silver Spring, Md. “If you talk to several friends at one time, everybody gets the same news at the same time. It also saves time because I don’t get that much time on the telephone, but I like to talk to a lot of friends. This way, I can talk to everybody at once.”
The calls tend to focus on typical adolescent concerns: boys, clothes, friends, parents, schoolwork, activities, music, movies and funny events.
Telecommunications industry watchers said group calling among teenagers started in recent years in some of the bigger cities when youngsters began using “vertical calling features,” such as three-way calling, call forwarding and call waiting.
“It’s their party line,” said Jeff Kagan, an Atlanta-based telecommunications industry analyst whose 14-year-old son, Jason, regularly talks with friends in groups on the phone.
Analysts said many adults order the extra phone services, then forget about them. But today’s youths--who have grown up with pagers, cell phones, fax machines, electronic games and home computers--are savvy enough to figure out the additional features.
Three-way calling takes place when one caller dials two others in a conference call; the two who were called can then each call others; and the connections often grow from there. The service typically costs $3 to $4 monthly, depending on the jurisdiction.
Bell Atlantic is contemplating a different pricing system, “looking to develop it on a per-use basis,” said spokesman Michel Daley. “It is one of the more popular services. . . . We do know teens are using it, but we have no hard, concrete studies. Just from informal research, we know that teens and adults use three-way for conference calling. We know teens tend to daisy-chain the service.”
Some systems use a call-by-call basis, at about 75 cents a call.
David Onak, spokesman for Ameritech Corp., a Chicago-based telecommunications company, said the number of phone lines with “vertical calling features” has increased by 18% nationally in the last 12 months.
Irma Zandl, president of the Zandl Group, a New York-based trend research firm, said she was in Detroit recently when she heard radio ads marketing three-way calling to young people. Party calling started among black youths in urban centers such as New York and Detroit, and has spread to suburban teenagers of all races, Zandl said.
Detroit eighth-grader Courtney Bledsoe, 13, links up with her boyfriend and her best girlfriend by phone most weeknights. “Boys aren’t as interested in the telephone as girls are,” Courtney said. “They just kind of listen.”
Courtney probably spends too much time on the telephone, but “being interested in the telephone is a normal part of their development,” said her mother, Jackie. “I hate to take something away that she enjoys doing so much.”
Several group callers said they most often make the calls to do homework. Some admitted selling their parents on three-way calling by stressing their need to study with friends. Emily, of Silver Spring, said she’s not allowed to talk by telephone on weekdays unless she’s discussing homework, though others in her group said the weekday conversations usually are at least partly social.
Robin Phillips, 17, a senior in the Washington suburb of Largo, turned to “hot line” calling at homecoming a few weeks ago. He was about to fork over $78 for a shirt, but he wanted to make sure no one else planned to wear anything similar.
“We all talked about what we were going to wear and where we were going to buy it to make sure nobody had the same shirt,” he said. “You do not want to have on the same thing as someone else at Largo’s homecoming.”
The senior float committee held strategy sessions over the telephone. Robin’s friends plan their weekend outings together. And when one friend bought the new Destiny’s Child CD, several of his friends heard it first via a group telephone call.
Vivian Heyward-Bey, mother of Emily’s friend Darrius, said she believes it’s a good use of the phone.
“They’re just friends, and they are talking as friends,” she said. “It is positive because they are learning how to deal with each other while they talk.”
