If you are a typical global citizen that owns a cell phone, you are a cross between a crustacean and a Bedouin. You carry your important belongings with you like the hermit crab’s mollusc shell but you never carry water because you know about oases.
In April 2008, The Economist ran a special report on mobility, highlighting the migratory nature of humans and how people (or crabs) who formerly roamed the desert carrying necessities of life with them wherever they went are now known as urban nomads, who are “defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it.”
The report is supplemented by three videos, each about 10 to 15 minutes long, narrated by Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems; Abhishek Ashok Kumar, a podcaster in Mumbai, India; and Jan Chipchase, a design researcher with Nokia. These three viewpoints, when viewed collectively, provide a unique perpsective on how and why we use technology to be more productive in our lives and for our friends and colleagues.
If you don’t own a cell phone now, you will
Look at Jan Chipchase, the Nokia researcher.
He spends his days living in Tokyo and traveling the world, tracking people, stalking them, rummaging through their belongings, understanding their lives.
His job is like an anthropologist; he tries to understand how people live their lives so he can improve them and make their lives more productive through cellular technology.
From an amazing 16-minute video he gave at a March 2007 TED conference in California (which I stronly urge you to click and watch) to a June 2008 interview to New Scientist to his blog, Jan is ubiquitously connected to the cell phone.
He says that among every culture in the world, regardless of race, ethnicity, or age, the items that everyone carries with them are keys, money, and mobile phones.
- You carry keys for security and shelter.
- You carry money to buy food.
- You carry a mobile device as a “recovery tool.”
Jan uses phrases like, “point of reflection,” to symbolize the act that everyone does involving tapping your pockets when leaving a location as a means of verifying you have your keys, wallet or purse, and phone. I do it. I bet you do, too.
And where are those items located when not in your pocket? Jan calls it a “center of gravity,” alluding to a nightstand, specific part of a desk, maybe an organizer, but somewhere that you always put your belongings.
Who uses cell phones?
I know a few people who don’t own a cell. I don’t know how they do it, but they manage. Maybe you know people, too, who don’t own one. Maybe you don’t own one.
I can’t find recent statistics on usage, so I’ll use the numbers that Jan cites:
- 6.3 billion people resided on Planet Earth in 2004
- 3.3 billion were projected to own a cell phone by the end of 2007
- 1 billion more people are expected to own a cell phone by the end of 2009
These numbers are social proof that people are using cell phones to be more productive in their lives. Everyone wants to reach out and touch someone. Don’t you?
And, it doesn’t matter that 800 million people in the world are illiterate, because Jan points out that people are using cells as conduits for business transactions.
Communication is occurring regardless of one’s ability to read or write.
I think that’s incredible.
What’s more suggestive is what occurs when a cell phone dies and there is no backup of your friends names and numbers. What do you do?
How do you reach out to your friends when you don’t know their phone numbers?
Through social networking, whether online or off, you ask your friends and colleagues and coworkers to give you their numbers.
Now, with the advent of Twitter and Facebook and Ning and all these other social media sites that enable you to be networked with the people you care about or want to do business with, you can send a quick message to them saying you lost their numbers.
Losing someone’s number, says Jan, forces you to think about who are the important people in your life. You can “start afresh…with a blank slate…and build from that.”
Here is the video that started me thinking about Jan and cell phones. Maybe you’ll like it, too.
What do you think? Do you agree that the world is slowly becoming a wireless world? Are you ready, if not already, to embrace a new way of doing business and keeping in touch with those you love?
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Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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