A year ago, when bluetooth was just breaking out into the mainstream I saw a truck driver with a wireless bluetooth headset clamped to his ear connected to his mobile phone. A few months before that, when cameraphones were just breaking out into the mainstream, most of the bin men I was working with had one, though they didn’t really know what to do with the pictures once they’d taken them.
Today I was sitting in the canteen at work and I heard a baby crying, which was out of place to say the least. Looking to my side I saw a man and two women from the cleaning staff watching a home movie, with sound, on one of their mobile phones. And not just a 10 second clip – it went on for a good five minutes. It wasn’t the technology that surprised me though. It was how utterly normally they treated it, like it was nothing special to have a digital video camera and television in the palm of your hand. You expect hip young urban professionals to have this type of kit and to make a fuss about it but when perfectly ordinary people are using this level of technology as a perfectly ordinary part of their perfectly ordinary lives then I suddenly become aware that truly I am living in the future.
Or that mobile phone companies are seriously fucking with people’s sense of priority.
You know, a few years ago I really wondered how young people work with ICQ. They used it to exchange homework. When I was at highschool, I didn’t even have Internet at home…
Ren� C. Kiesler