Reach Out and Touch Someone

[sarabande7]

"Life was so simple back in January of 1982. This was when Washington's first 100 hand-held cellphones were put into service. The size of a Philly cheese steak, each weighed almost two pounds. . . " *

This quote is from a Washington Post Article concerning the idea that pretty much everyone on Earth will soon have a cell phone (and why

Comments

[_quinn]

The speed of wireless saturation may well be inversely proportional to the existing coverage/quality of landlines; anything that lowers the bar helps. Frequently, it's not so much the infrastructure proper as the company that runs it which provides most of the drag on improving infrastructure; I suspect this has a lot more to do with broadband penetration than the lack of existing infrastructure. (Obviously, if you're running wires out to someplace for the first time, they may as well be broadband [fiber optics, etc]. I imagine in sompelace like South Korea, the government said "there shall be broadband"; and there was. Because of bizarreness introduced by the long history of AT&T and some odd decisions by, among others, the FCC, that'd be much harder to do in the US.)

LJ is about drama, right? ;) I must confess that I don't grok Twitter, but I don't grok the exact same information via cellphone, either, so that doesn't concern me as much. I see them as aspects of the same thing: maintaing a clique, in the tribal sense, without actually gathering the tribe. (This is to say that I don't feel like you and I and flutehues are a clique, or even that you and I are; or perhaps I should say, "aren't a clique in the sense I was thinking was a bad thing.) I don't think the ability to spend time and money on physically travelling places should be a prequisite to maintaining friendships; but worry about ... intellectual Balkanization, I guess. Communications technology can bring people together, but nobody benefits from groupthink. (I think this is actually a classic worry about the internet, in the "special interest groups get more 'special'" sense.)

Which is to say that my concern is not with loose networks, but with tight and likely closed ones. I wonder if constant clique-connecting helps the social animal cope with tight quarters, or if seems like a good idea but actually isn't.

[I hope that was coherent. I dropped this reply on the floor two weeks ago, and picked up in the middle...]