Hey! That wasn’t in the plan!

Stuff happens.

The good folks who invented the cell phone surely had their moment of epiphany. A sudden realization of the cell phone’s powerful impact on society. A premonition of some not so obvious scenarios that made them exclaim ; “My God! This thing can change the world!”. And change it did, in more ways than could possibly have been imagined. It is that kind of change, change that the inventors did not think about in their wildest dreams that the cell phone is driving in many fascinating ways.

The “Swiss Army” cell phone that can play music, take photos, surf the internet, navigate, fry an omelette [sic], etc. etc. is not what is fascinating in itself. People were doing all that, without the cell phone and before phone manufacturers started to lump it all into one device. What is interesting are the imaginative uses that some innovative folks have come up with, stuff that makes one exclaim “Hey! That surely wasn’t in the plan!”.

Recently at a casual conversation over coffee, I started to list such examples as I could think of….coffee got over, so did the discussion. However I thought it interesting enough to continue that thought process and share some of those examples.

1. The cell-phone novel, Japanese Style: Cell phone novels, called Keitai Shousetsu in Japanese, are novels that started out being authored by young Japanese women primarily around romantic subjects. The novels have gained in popularity to the extent that 5 of the top 10 selling novels in Japan in 2007 were originally cell phone novels. Starting from Japan, the phenomenon spread to China and there is now even a Malayalam cell phone novel. Hey! That wasn’t in the plan!
2. Collective Behavior: Particularly in emerging economies, the cell phone has become a powerful weapon to generate a mob or to generate similar behavior patterns amongst large parts of society. Wikipedia lists the example of a protest against the president of Philippines, organized mainly through text messages that led to removal of the president from office.  Closer home, I like the example of what was called the “Hindu Milk Miracle”. This was when word spread like wildfire, largely through text messages in the year 2006 (when in happened for the second time), about idols of Lord Ganesh drinking milk. This in turn led to large sections of people attempting to replicate the same at temples and homes across India, traffic gridlock around Ganesh temples and eventual shortage of milk!
3. Emergency Response, Cell Phones and Twitter:  Included this primarily due to the way Twitter became an important part of the emergency response during the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. Twitter users with cell phones on the scene helped compile list of dead and injured, and provided information on hospitals needing blood donations. Television networks even used Twitter to gather news as the attacks were unfolding in Mumbai. CNN went to the extent of terming it as “the day social media appeared to come of age”.

There must be other examples of the cell phone impacting the behavior of society at large. But if you thought that it was just humans who are affected, think again. It has been reported that some urban song birds have become adept at mimicking ring tones and melodies! The next time a cell phone rings in the city, don’t just pat your pocket and look at people around you. Look up! It could be from up there!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_phone_novels

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/22/081222fa_fact_goodyear?currentPage=all

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob

http://www.milkmiracle.com/

http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue6/issue6_nicholson.html

http://www.w3.org/2008/02/MS4D_WS/papers/joinus_v2.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter