The Cell Phone: Building a Global Community One Ring at a Time

Ryan Baebler — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:24:54 -0500

The article that appeared in The Washington Post last Sunday titled "Our Cells, Ourselves" talks extensively about the growth of cell phone technology. According to that article, we have on a global scale reached yet another tipping point. As Malcolm Gladwell might say, the cell phone has become a social epidemic. Depending on who you ask, we have either just passed, or are about to pass the point in time in which there are half as many cell phones in use as there are people on the planet. It is notable that Eric Schmidt, chairman of the board and enlightened CEO of Google has said that the trend "will end with 5 billion out of the 6 billion with cell phones," a figure that reaches well into the Base of the Pyramid.

In fact, as we are seeing more and more with the BoP, a cell phone is the ideal tool in an informal economy, a network in which there is little more than ipso facto social infrastructure. Suddenly, a fisherman can call ahead to see which port will offer the highest price on the day's catch, while at the same time, people who have never had access to financial services are being taken out of the somewhat insecure cash economy through value stored in prepaid networks. Network time is traded as a stable form of currency, and money is "wired" from a man working in the mines of South Africa to where his family can use it in Botswana. Cell phones are a more prevalent sign of "development" in Tibet than toilets are.

While iphones and hotmail might be touted as the epitome of the "idea economy" of the developed world, they also represent a departure from the "developmental" mode of making people more secure by making societies independent. Instead, as we can observe in our everyday lives, the cell phone and everything that one can do with it represents a way of making people more secure by facilitating their growing interdependence. In this way, cell phones are a tool of social system creation and community cohesion rather than social system destruction, which is too often attributable to development efforts. Because of the web-like structure of electronic social networks, a global community is emerging at the rate of 1,000 new cell phones every minute!

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The Cell Phone: Building a Global Community One Ring at a Time