"If you see someone on a cell phone...."

If you see someone with a cell phone, what do you think of them? Who do you guess they're talking to, and about what? Over the weekend, a friend of mine was in town and was using her photo-enabled cell phone to blog her trip. I guess that's part of what's got me thinking about cell phones today.

There are several bits in the news that have me thinking about cell phones and mobile computing. Here in NYC, there's an on-going story about public school restrictions on cell phones. And, in today's NYTimes there's a piece about the use of higher-range ring tones that, according to the article, younger people can hear but older people can't hear. What struck me about the coverage of this is the way adolescents are likened to other-than-human-creatures, like dogs, with special hearing.

This is via Rich Ling, and a forwarded email listserv posting. There's another news story on MSNBC and in Newsweek that caught my attention as well. The focus of the article is about the war in Iraq, and how you discern who is a threat, and what caught my eye was this quote:

"If you see someone with a cell phone," said one of the commanders, half-jokingly, "put a bullet in their f---ing head."

Here, people with cell phones are seen as a particular kind of threat, not unlike the public school kids in NYC are viewed.

Any time there's technological innovation, there are unintended consequences that follow. Howard Rheingold has an interesting piece from a couple of years ago comparing the development of mobile computing via cell phones with the other sorts of technological innovation, like the automobile. Some of the unintended consequences he talks about in this piece are about how technology has influenced mating and dating patterns, which certainly has some relevance for public health.

I wonder, too, about the unintended consequences of "Othering" and new technology, and I worry about the unintended consequences of mobile computing for forces that want to destroy civil liberties and human life.