November 11, 2005
Mobility Special: Plugged into it all
A Special Mobility Feature by the FT, on the social impact of mobile communications. A must read.
Excerpts:
... This is the beginning. The mobile phone is already morphing into an all-purpose messaging device, capable of catching and transmitting many of the minutiae of daily life, from the short snippets of text messages to impromptu photos. Laptops on campuses such as Berkeley and MIT are becoming windows into digital media.
“This is like watching the beginnings of the world wide web,” says Dick Lampman, director of Hewlett-Packard’s research labs. Trying to predict exactly how this personal communications revolution is going to change your life is likely to lead to the same kind of hyperbole - and mistakes - that characterised the early dotcom days, he says, but “you can see the early pieces of it, joined up, in the mobile phone world”.
... What Kenichi Fujimoto, a researcher at Keio University in Japan, calls the “schoolgirl pager revolution” remains one of the most revealing technology events of recent years. Simple numeric pages, designed for business use, were taken up in the early 1990s by teenage girls, who used them to send coded messages to each other. That became one of the models for the short text messaging that now seems to define youth culture.
It was a seminal moment for the technology industry, a sign that the forces of technological innovation had been turned on their head. New technologies had always been created for business use first, on the assumption that employers would be prepared to pay for gadgets that made their workers more productive. That was how the first brick-like mobile phones got their start. Now, though, it is consumers - often teenagers - who are the early adopters of many new technologies. The rest of us follow their lead.
To understand just how deeply mobile communications may eventually affect your life, it helps to consider the habits of Japanese schoolgirls. ...
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