No matter how you feel about them, cell phones are everywhere and have, literally, changed the world.
staff and wire reports | Posted: Wednesday, March 5, 2008 6:00 pm
The human race has crossed a line: There is now one cell phone for every two humans on Earth.
In about 26 years, we’ve passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cell phones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans. This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history — faster even than the polio vaccine.
“We knew this was going to happen a few years ago. And we know how it will end,” says Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman and CEO. “It will end with 5 billion out of the 6” with cell phones. A reasonable prediction is 4 billion by 2010. And then the final billion or so within a few years thereafter.
Eventually, more people will use a cell phone than can read and write.
These hunks of plastic smaller than a candy bar have transformed the world faster than did electricity, automobiles, refrigeration, credit cards or television.
And mobile phones continue to get hooked up at a rate of more than 1,000 a minute.
Cell phones are the first telecommunications technology in history to have more users in the developing world — almost 60 percent — than in the West. Cell phone usage in Africa has been growing close to 50 percent annually, faster than any other region. More than 30 African nations have more cell phones than land lines. In only 11 years, Grameenphone now covers 98 percent of Bangladesh and serves the majority of the country’s 30 million telephone users, only about a million of whom have land lines.
How did this happen? Some say it’s because cell phones bring us together, while other technology tears us apart.
“The Internet is quite global. But the mobile phone is the way social cohesion is taking place. It tightens the bonds between us,” says Rich Ling, an American who researches the social consequences of mobile telephony for Telenor, a global phone company.
“All of the other electronic mediation — television, the Internet — there’s a real question whether they’re fraying the social fabric. But all the research with mobile phones shows tightening bonds within small groups.” That’s because with cell phones, “I call an individual. In the old system, I call a place and hope somebody might be there.”
“It’s the technology most adapted to the essence of the human species: sociability,” says Arthur Molella, director of the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. “It’s the ultimate tool to find each other. It’s wonderful technology for being human.”
Maybe. But do our mobiles now render us unprecedentedly free? Or permanently tethered?
Here’s what Robert Wright, author of “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny,” thinks:
“Are you more free or less? Both. You’re less confined to a single space. But ultimately it feels pretty damn tethered. That network of e-mail correspondence that you have to respond to. You give people your cell phone number so they can reach you at any time. You’re choosing to build this prison. But it is a prison.”