March 16, 2004
Mobile Phone Is Master
Jeremy Wagstaff for the WSJ reports on a Siemens survey describing how cell phones are not only changing our lives, but changing who we are; "they have become an extension of our personality".
"If someone had said to you 10 years ago that, in 2004, the majority of people would consider their mobile phone to be an "extension of their personality," you would have been forgiven for looking skeptical and saying: "What's a mobile phone?" And yet that's exactly what German electronics giant Siemens AG found in a recent survey. Across Asia, sizeable percentages of folk believe their cellphone and its contents -- music, games, contacts and messages -- form an extension of themselves.
Heaven only knows what we'll be saying in five more years. Perhaps we'll be sending cellphones to represent us in meetings, on dates, and make speeches on our behalf at the United Nations General Assembly.
But perhaps we don't realize how much we have become its slave. Consider other elements of the Siemens Mobile Survey: With the exception of Australia, in every country surveyed the majority polled said they would go back for their phone if they left it at home (in Australia it was a respectable 39%)".
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2004/03/003275.htm