Perhaps most people wouldn't want to use their phones to coordinate play with strangers. Nalini Kotamraju is a PhD candidate at UC Berkely, a sociologist specializing in the everyday uses of information technology. In her ethnographic studies with teenagers from the United Kingdom and the United States, she observed that people primarily communicate with people they already know, from pre-mobile circumstances. The bulk of people's relationships come from their class, their schooling, their established social group. Mobility has not immediately disrupted those patterns, she asserts. New technologies like mobile phones and their ever-evolving communications applications present new modes of interaction, new ways of courtship, she acknowledges, but within the existing framework of social mores. And social mores take a long time to evolve.

The article in the feature discuss the way mobile devices impact chances of "hooking up".