Cellphone : The Story of the World's Most Mobile Medium and How It Has Transformed Everything!

Rating:
Summary: Just another technocrat on the IRT
Review: This author like many technocrats seems to have an embedded ideology that a new technology--like the cell phone--is just so seductive that we poor weak humans just get caught up in the tidal wave of a medium that forces us to be taken with it. He also seems to take a rather ethnocentric view of the technology; to whit, that of its use among the typical middle class American. Popularity of cell phones, as far as I've observed, are intertwined with the country or culture that's adopted them. For example, in many European countries, where regular phone service is difficult to obtain, the cell is a natural convenience. Additionally, while the cell phone is a cultural phenomenon, it's also an economic one, and any visit to a Radio Shack demonstrates a huge profit accrues via "accessories," often needless gee-gaws for gadget hungry folks who don't know what to do with their money. Meanwhile, the cell phone industry was told by the FCC to develop a voice activated phone for the blind, a truly humane, significant and effective use of the medium. It took them 8 years to get around to it because the blind aren't a major purchasing group as opposed to business people and conversation-junkie teenagers. Playing into the minds of a consumer society, the flood of advertising for all frivolous cell phone uses and styles via media advertisement makes the average manipulated consumer buy needless things, or at least place a blueprint in their consciousness that brings that thing to the forefront rather than being integrated into the wealth of thoughts, beliefs and values a well-rounded individual shoud have. As such, this analysis of the cell phone like much (American)analysis of media, fails to acknowledge the economics of communications and its subtext. One major one is that the work day has expanded by two hours on average from the 1980's to the present. In a sense the cell phone is a good training tool for youth so that they can work long hours and still get things done that in previous days one would have had to take time off for, to whit, making doctors appointments, checking your portfolio, working while you're having lunch, breakfast, dinner. It's the perfect capitalist too. One can castigate the nature of TV news bias, its soundbite content, etc., but so long as powerful economic forces find it attracts viewers, no businessperson in his right mind would gainsay either the form or function of a technology. What is most troubling with this book is that it doesn't address the powerful economic forces behind new technologies that find ways of insinuating the "need" for them into first our consciouses, then our behavior, and finally into our economy. I suppose, however, that when you combine the "gee whiz" mentality of the average American with the unemployment-proof tenured position of the professor (the author is a Professor of Communications, and I assume, a tenured one), the effect of economic forces is not on the radar screen. Maybe a few days work on the assembly line in a cell phone factory or being in daily life-threatening confrontations by knucklehead drivers more focused on their mouthpiece than the road during the morning & evening rush hours (something academics don't have to face) might add a little reality to this ivory tower perspective.