Welcome to the 'My Mobile Guru', a unique mobile phone service which offers immediate help discreetly and conveniently by way of voice recordings downloaded straight to your mobile/PC/landline.
This unique site provides each visitor guidance with regards to problems in the many areas of life that we all experience, such as relationships, health and work.
Every new feature that is added changes patterns of use which in turn changes what it means to be a ‘phone’. Is there a natural limit to convergence? And, staring out from the back seat of a fast moving consumer goods vehicle, are we there yet? Some of you are old enough to remember the humble wrist watch as your primary tool through which to know what time it is but today knowledge of the current time is a commodity - there are so many free and readily available alternative sources of this information. (Yes, wrist watches are still relevant but mostly as lifestyle statements).As with the wrist watch there was an era before the mobile phone as we know it and will be an era after.
four trends will ensure the practice and willingness to disconnect evolves.
(1) The first is that there will be an increased willingness to carry secondary, tertiary, quaternary and even quinary+ communication focused devices.
(2) never equate ownership of a connected device with use of its primary function particularly when use of the primary function costs money.
(3) Advances in miniaturisation, materials and manufacturing techniques will enable radically new and highly focused form factors.
(4) Lastly, our understanding of what is required to make stuff more social will have matured to the point where it is, by most people’s perspective, reasonably social.
In time the design, language and social norms for connecting, dis-connecting and re-connecting will have reached the point where switch becomes the primary interface to our digital selves.
I think the future will be about choosing level of connectedness - and controlling personal data and information. Status won’t be about connecting. Privileged and status will be shown through the ability to disconnect completely from communication channels. What a strange inversion.
Text messaging was an accident. No one expected it. When the first text message was sent, in 1993 by new Nokia engineering student Riku Pihkonen, the telecommunications companies thought it was not important. SMS – Short Message Service – was not considered a major part of GSM. Like most technologies, the power of text – indeed the power of the phone – was discovered by users. In the case of text messaging, the users were the young are poor in the West and East.
While it might have felt like liberation from tradition, the owner was caught anew in a more modern rationality, for, despite the fact that the pocket watch gave the owner personal access to exact time, accuracy depended on being-part of a system. If the owner was unwilling personally to make regular astronomical observations, the pocket watch would still have to be reset every ‘now‘ and then from the town clock.
What makes the CVSL-112 even more unique is the projector feature. Simply switch on the external display option and project your movies or data on a wall. Perfect for fun or for meetings.
Tantalum, in the form of columbite-tantalite (‘Coltan’ for short), can also be found in the anarchic north-east regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where more than 10,000 civilians have died and 200,000 have been displaced since June 1999 in a civil war, fought partly over strategic mineral rights, between supporters of the deceased despot Laurent. Kabila and Ugandan and Rwandan rebels. As the price of tantalum increased, the civil war intensified, funded by the profits of coltan export. However, the mobile phone manufacturers are distanced from the conflict. Firms such as Nokia, and Motorola buy capacitors from separate manufacturers, which in turn, buy raw material from intermediaries. On each exchange, the source of tantalum becomes more deniable.*
Tantalum Memorial - Residue, by England-based Graham Harwood, Richard Wright, and Matsuko Yokokoji, is a telephony-based memorial to the people who have died as a result of the tantalum wars in the Congo. The installation is constructed out of an old electro-mechanical 1938 Strowger telephone exchange, discovered amongst the remains of the Alumix factory. The switches are reanimated by tracking the phone calls from Telephone Trottoire - a social telephony network designed by the artists in collaboration with the Congolese radio program Nostalgie Ya Mboka in London. The TT network calls Congolese listeners, plays them a phone message and invites them to record a comment and pass it on to a friend by entering their phone number. This builds on the traditional Congolese practice of “radio trottoire” or “pavement radio”, the passing around of news and gossip on street corners in order to avoid state censorship.
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