January 15, 2007
The Luke Johnson Phone Experiment
The Cell Freak reports on a cell phone experiment by 27 year-old Luke Johnson from Arizona, solliciting calls to his cellphone through a video published on YouTube.
"The idea is to find out how many people will call me if I post my cell phone on the Internet for the whole world to see. Call my cell phone. I don't care why you call or what you say.
... Meanwhile I'm going to keep track of how many calls I receive to find out how many strangers will call someone they've never met before in their entire life."
So far 11,914 people have taken Luke Johnson up on his offer, some from as far away as Japan, Thailand, and South Africa and and his social project has been picked up and aired on CNN.
Johnson's experiment reminds me of the Payphone-Project, a website that catalogs pay phone numbers from all over the world and posts them online - so that anyone can reach out and touch someones passing by phones booths as far away as New Zealand or Antarctica, or even the pay phone at the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
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