PJH Studios

Tag: cell phones

  • A school in Kentucky banned phones. And the kids started talking to each other

    A school in Kentucky banned phones. Unsurprisingly, they interacted more, and surprisingly, library circulation went up.

    “There is definitely a different feeling,” Neuss said. “It’s hard to quantify something like that. But it’s noticeable when you talk with students, walk through the hallways and go into classes.”

    What is easier to quantify is the immediate impact of the ban on students’ use of the school library. In the first month of school this year, students took out 67 percent more books than the same month last year, with 533 books checked out in August 2024 and 891 books checked out in August 2025. That’s for a student body of 2,189.

  • A history of cell phone ringtones as told by statistics

    Remember when people paid good money for a cell phone ringtone?

    In 2003, a Swedish animator created a 3D frog character to accompany “The Annoying Thing,” which caught the attention of ringtone maker Jamba!, who eventually combined “The Annoying Thing,” the 3D frog character, and the theme music from Beverly Hills Cop, rebranding this conceptual Frankenstein as “Axel F.”

    At its peak, Crazy Frog captured 31% of the UK ringtone market, generating over £40 million in sales in 2005, driven by an extensive advertising blitz where the song was featured up to 26 times a day on British television (per channel), reaching an estimated 87% of the population. The ringtone was so ubiquitous that it later spawned a full-length single, which climbed to #50 on the Billboard Hot 100.

    Crazy Frog’s meteoric rise is a perfect encapsulation of the 2000s ringtone craze: a grating 30-second meme that started as a phone alert, morphed into a charting single, and is now a forgotten relic—practically unknown to Gen Z.

  • What modern kids want

    Children want to meet up in person, no screens or supervision. But because so many parents restrict their ability to socialize in the real world on their own, kids resort to the one thing that allows them to hang out with no adults hovering: their phones.

    One reason kids retreat to their phones is they can’t connect with other kids in an unstructured way.