Digital Design Blog

A Global Tipping Point for Cellphone Ubiquity?

Joel Garreau of the Washington Post has written a very interesting piece on the social impact of mobile telephony titled Our Cells, Ourselves. In it he states that the cellphone represents the “fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history”, pointing out that there are currently 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of 6.6 billion people, a development that has occurred within the relatively brief timespan of 26 years. He goes on to say that the cellphone has become the “technology most adapted to the essence of the human species” due to the extent to which it enables sociability.

“At some point your society gets so big that it’s plainly different than a hunter-gatherer village. This is a threshold you only pass a few times in the history of life, when you build something that looks like a superorganism,” says Robert Wright, author of “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.”“All of these technologies have the potential to make human social groups more efficient ’superorganisms’ on larger and larger scales. Corporations today are bigger and more efficient than they were 50 years ago. They’re more responsive to change in a shorter time and cover more ground because of these sorts of technology. They are more vividly like organisms.“In the long run these technologies have the capacity to bring social order on a larger scale. But in the short run, the tendency is towards turbulence. China is dealing with this in particular. Cellphones play a role in protests and riots. They make crowds seemingly spontaneously appear.” 

Currently there are at least 30 nations with more cellphones than population - more than a thousand mobile phones are being activated every minute. This staggering pace of cellphone penetration promises both new opportunities for economic growth in developing countries and new concerns over individual privacy and security. Read the article here.In related news, more than 1 billion mobile phones were sold globally in 2007 according to ComputerWorld, a 16% increase from 2006. Most of the growth is attributed to first phone purchases in China and India. Gartner Inc. projects continued growth, and cites Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericcson, and LG as the dominate device manufacturers globally. Via Textually