Group items tagged

From an unseen distance, Chipchase used his phone to pilot me through the unfamiliar chaos, allowing us to have what he calls a “just in time” moment. “Just in time” is a manufacturing concept that was popularized by the Japanese carmaker Toyota when, beginning in the late 1930s, it radically revamped its production system, virtually eliminating warehouses stocked with big loads of car parts and instead encouraging its assembly plants to order parts directly from the factory only as they were needed. The process became less centralized, more incremental. Car parts were manufactured swiftly and in small batches, which helped to cut waste, improve efficiency and more easily correct manufacturing defects. As Toyota became, in essence, lighter on its feet, the company’s productivity rose, and so did its profits. There are a growing number of economists who maintain that cellphones can restructure developing countries in a similar way. Cellphones, after all, have an economizing effect. My “just in time” meeting with Chipchase required little in the way of advance planning and was more efficient than the oft-imperfect practice of designating a specific time and a place to rendezvous. He didn’t have to leave his work until he knew I was in the vicinity. Knowing that he wasn’t waiting for me, I didn’t fret about the extra 15 minutes my taxi driver sat blaring his horn in Accra’s unpredictable traffic. And now, on foot, if I moved in the wrong direction, it could be quickly corrected. Using mobile phones, we were able to coordinate incrementally. “Do you see the footbridge?” Chipchase was saying over the phone. “No? O.K., do you see the giant green sign that says ‘Believe in God’? Yes? I’m down to the left of that.”

To get a sense of how rapidly cellphones are penetrating the global marketplace, you need only to look at the sales figures. According to statistics from the market database Wireless Intelligence, it took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold in four years, and the third billion sold in two. Eighty percent of the world’s population now lives within range of a cellular network, which is double the level in 2000. And figures from the International Telecommunications Union show that by the end of 2006, 68 percent of the world’s mobile subscriptions were in developing countries. As more and more countries abandon government-run telecom systems, offering cellular network licenses to the highest-bidding private investors and without the burden of navigating pre-established bureaucratic chains, new towers are going up at a furious pace. Unlike fixed-line phone networks, which are expensive to build and maintain and require customers to have both a permanent address and the ability to pay a monthly bill, or personal computers, which are not just costly but demand literacy as well, the cellphone is more egalitarian, at least to a point.

The first-year students averaged 52 minutes per day on social networks such as Facebook. On average, they sent between 11 and 20 text messages per day and spent 45 minutes texting or talking on a cell phone. Most students had between 150 and 200 Facebook friends.

More significantly, Jacobsen’s analysis reveals that Facebook and cell phones facilitated face-to-face interactions for this group of students. Initially the researchers suspected that digital media would partially replace offline socializing. Instead they found that face time increased by 10 to 15 minutes for every hour spent with social media and cell phones.

The premise of the work is simple — get to know your potential customers as well as possible before you make a product for them. But when those customers live, say, in a mud hut in Zambia or in a tin-roofed hutong dwelling in China, when you are trying — as Nokia and just about every one of its competitors is — to design a cellphone that will sell to essentially the only people left on earth who don’t yet have one, which is to say people who are illiterate, making $4 per day or less and have no easy access to electricity, the challenges are considerable.

Text messaging, or S.M.S. (short message service), turns out to be a particularly cost-effective way to connect with otherwise unreachable people privately and across great distances. Public health workers in South Africa now send text messages to tuberculosis patients with reminders to take their medication. In Kenya, people can use S.M.S. to ask anonymous questions about culturally taboo subjects like AIDS, breast cancer and sexually transmitted diseases, receiving prompt answers from health experts for no charge.

A cellphone in the hands of an Indian fisherman who uses it to grow his business — which presumably gives him more resources to feed, clothe, educate and safeguard his family — represents a textbook case of bottom-up economic development, a way of empowering individuals by encouraging entrepreneurship

Uganda, the first African country to have more mobiles than fixed telephones, is cited as an example of cultural and economic transformation. Penetration has risen from 0.2% in 1995 to 23% in 2008, with operators making huge investments in infrastructure, particularly in rural areas. Given their low incomes, only about a quarter of Ugandans have a mobile subscription, but street vendors offer mobile access on a per-call basis. They also invite those without access to electricity to charge their phones using car batteries.Popular mobile services include money transfers, allowing people without bank accounts to send money by text message. Many farmers use mobiles to trade and check market prices.

This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.

Say you punch "Station SNAFU" on your logic. Relays in the tank take over an' whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecastin' comes on your logic's screen. Or you punch "Sally Hancock's Phone" an' the screen blinks an' sputters an' you're hooked up with the logic in her house an' if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today's race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House durin' Garfield's administration or what is PDQ and R sellin' for today, that comes on the screen too.

it made Joe a individual

But I think he went kinda remote-control exploring in the tank.

How could you survive without the media, the internet and a mobile phone for 24 hours?

I didn't expect it, but being deprived of the media for 24 hours resulted in my day-to-day activities becoming so much harder to carry out than usual.

See It Now focused on a number of controversial issues in the 1950s, but it is best-remembered as the show that criticized McCarthyism and the Red Scare, contributing if not leading to the political downfall of Senator Joseph McCarthy. On March 9, 1954, Murrow, Friendly, and their news team produced a half-hour See It Now special entitled "A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy".[9] Murrow used excerpts from McCarthy's own speeches and proclamations to criticize the senator and point out episodes where he had contradicted himself. Murrow knew full well that he was using the medium of television to attack a single man and expose him to nationwide scrutiny, and he was often quoted as having doubts about the methods he used for the report. Murrow and Friendly paid for their own newspaper advertisement for the program; they were not allowed to use CBS' money for the publicity campaign or even use the CBS logo. Nevertheless, the broadcast contributed to a nationwide backlash against McCarthy and is seen as a turning point in the history of television. It provoked tens of thousands of letters, telegrams and phone calls to CBS headquarters, running 15 to 1 in favor. In a retrospective produced for Biography, Friendly noted how truck drivers pulled up to Murrow on the street in subsequent days and shouted "Good show, Ed. Good show, Ed." Murrow offered McCarthy a chance to appear on See It Now to respond to the criticism. McCarthy accepted the invitation and made his appearance three weeks later,[10] but his rebuttal only served to further decrease his already fading popularity.[11] In the program following McCarthy's appearance, Murrow commented that the senator had "made no reference to any statements of fact that we made" and contested the personal attacks made by "the junior senator from Wisconsin" against himself.[12]