Cell Phone Mechanics: The Beginning of the End
To illustrate the point of socially shaped technology, let’s turn to the cell phone. It was one of the biggest implementations of technology. The cell phone was the beginning of truly portable communicative technology, and led to both simplifications and complications. Children could reach their parents by phone at any time, and vice versa. Husbands and wives could send quick messages and reminders to each other throughout the day. Friends could plan nights out and help each other with homework.
At the same time, people were crashing cars because of the attention given to their phones. The cell phone became so advanced that people relied on it not only for communication, but for taking pictures and videos, as a navigation system, and to receive work emails. Dependence on the devices continued to grow, and people started to talk to them, and worry about them as if they were animated, feeling beings.
Using this technology to our benefit was not a bad thing. Looking up facts in an instant, calling someone for help, and finding your way around a new city were incredible features of the cell phone. Becoming so dependent as to obsess over it while in a vehicle moving seventy-five miles an hour was a bad thing. I found commercials warning people not to use them in cars, usually because they were trying to send a message that really could wait until the car stopped:
Of course, it took a lot of work to get to that point. Researchers spent more than ten years to get SMS, or text messages, to send and deliver properly. Work began in 1978 in Europe, and the first message finally sent successfully in 1992. SMS was a store-and-forward system, so the message was sent from a handset device to a server, then dispatched to the intended recipient. The whole system was designed with business professionals in mind: the idea was messages wouldn’t need to be predetermined anymore, they could be composed at time of dispatch. It was a quicker, more efficient was to disseminate information.
Regardless of the intentions of the technology, young, non-professionals took it and ran. In 2000, almost one billion messages were sent in Finland, with a population of only five million. Friends used to them as a different way to chat that was similar to online Instant Messaging, but now portable.
Even at these first levels of development, cell phones and texting became so sought after all over the world that they became the basis of a new form of inequality. The devices were expensive, the plans were expensive, and people who didn’t have them, or couldn’t afford them, were somehow lesser for it. A complete class of people was excluded from the in-crowd. These were unintended consequences, but the continuation of cellular implementation meant those consequences were worth less than the benefits people believed to have gained.
As technology improved, phones came with all kind of capabilities, and all kinds of storage space. People could keep their entire lives on their phones, and they did. Something that was wholly unnecessary at one point in time morphed into the lifeblood of an entire generation. Losing your phone meant losing everything you were, and everything you wanted to be. If that’s not dependence, I don’t know what is.
