Writing in the this spring, an executive for a wireless company noted that “in Slovakia, people are using mobile phones to remotely switch on the heat before they return home,” and in Norway, “1.5 million people can confirm their tax returns” using cell phone short text messaging services.
Paramedics use camera phones to send ahead to hospitals pictures of the incoming injuries; “in Britain, it is now commonplace for wireless technology to allow companies to remotely access meters or gather diagnostic information.” Construction workers on-site can use cell phones to send pictures to contractors off-site.
The safety rationale carries a particular poignancy after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
On that day, many men and women used cell phones to speak their final words to family and loved ones.
Especially in the United States, where cell phone use still remains low compared to other countries, we are rapidly approaching a tipping point with this technology.
How has it changed our behavior, and how might it continue to do so? Most importantly, how has the wireless telephone encouraged us to connect individually but disconnect socially, ceding, in the process, much that was civil and civilized about the use of public space?onnection has long served as a potent sign of power.In the era before cell phones, popular culture served up presidents, tin-pot dictators, and crime bosses who were never far from a prominently placed row of phones, demonstrating their importance at the hub of a vast nexus.The CTIA noted that in 2001, nearly 156,000 wireless emergency service calls were made every day — about 108 calls per minute.Technological Good Samaritans place calls to emergency personnel when they see traffic accidents or crimes-in-progress; individuals use their cell phones to call for assistance when a car breaks down or plans go awry.ell is other people,” Sartre observed, but you need not be a misanthrope or a diminutive French existentialist to have experienced similar feelings during the course of a day.No matter where you live or what you do, in all likelihood you will eventually find yourself participating in that most familiar and exasperating of modern rituals: unwillingly listening to someone else’s cell phone conversation.” The choices: “Matches/Lighter,” “Food/Water,” “Another Person,” “Wireless Phone.” The World Health Organization has even launched an “International EMF Project” to study the possible health effects of the electromagnetic fields created by wireless technologies.But if this ubiquitous technology is now a normal part of life, our adjustment to it has not been without consequences.Recently, when a professor at Rutgers University asked his students to experiment with turning off their cell phones for 48 hours, one young woman told , “I felt like I was going to get raped if I didn’t have my cell phone in my hand.I carry it in case I need to call someone for help.” Popular culture endorses this image of cell-phone-as-life-line.