An Exploratory Study of the Effects of Mobile Phone Dependency on Maritime Safety

Safety at sea continues to be an important topic for research. The factors that contribute to safety issues are often complex and unclear. Lack of non-technical skills in such areas as communication, teamworking, situational awareness, decision making etc. are well documented as directly affecting safety in high risk work settings such as on board merchant vessels. Competence in non-technical skills can be affected by various habits and circumstances that influence a worker and result in either positive thinking and behaviour or negative thinking and behaviour. Negative thinking can cause stress, anger, frustration; loneliness etc. and this can possibly result in behaviour or actions that undermine the safety of crew and ship. Factors that may contribute to these negative thoughts and behaviours are many and varied and this paper will be looking at one aspect: mobile phone use. In the Republic of Korea, dependency on mobile phones is uniquely high. Maritime students are also susceptible to such dependency and this paper will demonstrate that the symptoms associated with mobile phone addiction and dependency, and in particular the symptoms of withdrawal, are important factors that need to be mitigated in order to improve safety at sea. Although the benefits of mobile phones are many it will be suggested that over-reliance, dependency or addiction can result in negative thinking or behaviour that may directly or indirectly contribute to the factors that cause incidents and accidents at sea. It will be suggested that the most appropriate method of dealing with this problem is twofold: firstly, through training at the educational level and secondly, by encouraging the shipping industry and government to invest more into providing seafarers with better access to the communication methods that they are used to on shore in order to improve work conditions.