If anyone needs yet another piece of evidence that the mobile phone is something that will change the world, think about this number – 2.7 billion. That is the number of phones that are out there according to Allan Moore and Tomi Ahonen’s essay on Communities Dominate Brands.
The essay points out that the generation time for phones is about 18 months and that “Northamexica” (nee the US and Canada) are far behind the rest of the world when it comes to anything to do with the ubergadget (take a look at their interesting take on the iPhone). Across the planet, there are regions where people have more than one phone (and we thought it was interesting when in “Northamexica” we had more than one TV per family) and as time passes, the phone will put more users on the internet and enable them to access to a massive array of information or content. The mobile phone will even kill the seemingly indomitable radio, a technology that would have remained king of the heap we it not for the ubergadget’s ability to assimilate everything in it’s path. Interestingly enough, both these technologies (TV and Radio) were really only ever dominant in the industrial world.
To my mind, it’s interesting that the TV and Radio are largely passive technologies – ones that you can grow fat on. So it makes sense that in an opulent society, these would rule, but outside of that world, or in a world that is moving constantly or doesn’t have space or resources to waste, smaller is better and the ubergadet certainly fits this bill. The killer app that represents this ability to make the best of resources seems to be SMS (yes, the bane of parents and teachers everywhere is the dominate way to exchange information). A quote:
E-mail is opened in 24 hours and replied to in 48 hours. SMS is read within 15 minutes on average and responded within 60 minutes. 65% of e-mail is spam, less than 10% of SMS is spam. E-mail is so last year (or last decade actually). If this seems wild to you, remember something our bosses used to swear by, called fax? Nobody communicates by fax anymore. Soon e-mail will face the same fate, an outmoded form of slow and tedious communication that reaches so few. Voicemail? Stop using it and get with the times. The Finnish Prime Minister for example has a voicemail greeting saying he doesn’t listen to voicemail, send him a text message instead.
So if we want our kids in Canada or the US to really get a head start in being able to compete with the rest of the world – why are we trying to cut them off from the technology (and the business) that is dominant?
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