This podcast is the result of a two month research project conducted from October to December 2019. The format of our research was required to be a podcast by our academic professor. Our research is meant to explore how the use of cellphones in the metro impacts the behavior of commuters everyday. In order to gather our data, we intercepted eight people in the Parisian underground of which five were men and three were women, ages 18 to 26. In addition to these in-depth interviews, observation allowed us to enrich our method of researching. Although we assessed that our primary limitation resides in the fact that we didn’t separate the data between males and females due to a short time window, it refrained us from conducting a comparative analysis. In addition, the length of the podcast had to respect a duration of approximately 10 minutes which we found to be difficult to integrate given our desire to provide an extended rationale for our method. Therefore, we invite future researchers to take this research further, with more depth (taking in consideration gender, age, social background, or even conducting it in other locations) and to include a full rationale for their methods. In addition, it should be added that our hypothesis was that people use their cellphones to break from the social situation created by the metro environment. However, we have found that breaking the social link with the others was not the initial cause of the use of the cellphones but resulted from a maximization of people’s times, a desire to keeping themselves busy and for self-enjoyment. 

Mayar Alanis & Clothilde Morin