Cell Phone Culture And Dr. Gerard Goggin's Cell Phone Culture

It’s hard to believe that the cell phone, which has revolutionized daily life, is a relatively new phenomenon. It wasn’t that long ago, that a telephone was like a piece of “furniture” that connected to a wall in a home or place of business and was used for making a telephone call. Today a cell phone is a part of one’s wardrobe. It goes where we go, and it is used for so much more than making calls. In his book Cell Phone Culture, Dr. Gerard Goggin looks at the cultural implications of this transformative piece of technology. But to do so, he first discusses the history of the cell phone and how that history impacted society. Police cars and emergency services used two-way radios in the 1930’s and 40’s but World War II gave

The article poignantly observes that “mobile” technology may at times not have anything to do with “mobility” pointing to the example of young people who text each other while sitting in the very same room (Lacoheé 203)! Like Dr. Goggin, these authors provide an overview of the history of mobile technology but their piece does so from a global perspective. AT&T was in the lead of mobile technological advances in the 1940’s but couldn’t hold it. “The sheer size of America presented problems that were not to be encountered elsewhere.” European countries were much smaller and they were able to advance much more quickly. But in Europe service nationalized in some countries, like the United Kingdom. Service also had to be standardized so that mobile users could travel from country to country without service interruption. In the 1990’s the mobile phone “leaped” out of our cars and into our hands due to pivotal advances in technology. “Once batteries became powerful and portable, mobile telephones could become small and light enough to carry around.” Lacohée points to this key moment in history as the time when the mobile phone went from a tool used by the business elite to a means of communication in widespread use by the general public (Lacoheé

It is interesting to note that an article written in 2003 discussed text messaging as a young adult phenomenon. It addressed the difficulty of older fingers using tiny keyboards (Lacoheé 206). Things have changed. Text messaging is used by young and old alike today. Interestingly, other predictions in the article, which was written over ten years ago, still haven’t happened yet such as video tattoos and smart make-up and perfume (Lacoheé 209).What is clear is that we are living in a world that is ever-changing and with those changes come implications for how we behave as individuals and as a society. Does cell-phone enabled easy access to information on the internet hinder our quest for knowledge or enhance it? In our schools, does it make our students lazy or more efficient? Does our ability to bury ourselves in our phones enhance our communication with each other or isolate ourselves from each other? Whether we consider our “advances” in mobile technology as steps forward or steps back still remains to be