Our Cells, Ourselves

The reporter was prescient. "It may be the death knell of what, if anything, remains of civilization in this city," he wrote. "In a year or so the phone may be ringing up there all the time, not to mention in saunas, golf carts, hot air balloons, the middle of fox hunts, lovemaking, tennis and whatever else you may have done believing that you were safe from ringing phones."

Back in those days -- there were only seven cell relays in the Washington area -- even the most wildly enthusiastic advocates proved shortsighted. Peter Erb, president of a pioneering cellphone company called Millicom, made a seemingly extravagant claim: "We're talking about 50 to 60 million over the next 20 or 30 years." He only underestimated by a factor of 60.

Not as legendary or fateful a mistake as AT&T's, however. In 1980, the company whose Bell Labs invented cellphones listened to McKinsey, the consulting company they'd hired. Its estimate of the market in the year 2000 was off by a factor of 120 -- not even 1 percent of the real number. Based on that, AT&T decided there wasn't much future to these toys. Not coincidentally, in 2005, it was swallowed up by SBC Communications Inc., originally a Baby Bell.

Little did these suits guess that hunks of plastic smaller than a candy bar would transform the world faster than did electricity, automobiles, refrigeration, credit cards or television.

Routines are no longer routine. Girls stare into their cellphone screens as if into the mirrors of compacts, looking to see a reflection of themselves in who has called, who has messaged. Parents no longer know who has a crush on whom -- boys no longer call the house. As the career plunge of Michael (Seinfeld's "Kramer") Richards demonstrates, most Americans' mobiles are now equipped with cameras; will there ever again be an unrecorded indiscretion?

"I wonder if police reports have gone up because of cellphones," muses Jaimee Minney of M:Metrics, a provider of mobile-media data. "When I hadn't heard from my fiance for four hours, I was convinced he was in a car accident. I called the police. There's a heightened expectation that you can find somebody. I went a little crazy."

And that's in the States, where for two generations more than 90 percent of all households have had fixed phones. If anything, cellphones have made a bigger difference, faster, in underdeveloped places where land lines have been scarce, like Botswana and France. (In 1968, only 16 percent of French homes had telephones, a fifth as many as Sweden.)

Take politics. As long ago as 2001, the people of the Philippines for the first time overthrew a dictator with their cellphones. Joseph Estrada, accused of massive corruption, was driven out of power by activists who, through text messaging, could bring hundreds of thousands of people into the streets in minutes. "It's like pizza delivery," said Alex Magno, a political science professor at the University of the Philippines. "You can get a rally in 30 minutes -- delivered to you."

In the hellish Madrid train bombings of 2004, cellphones were used as detonators. Then they heavily influenced the outcome of the presidential election three days later when the ruling party used traditional media to try to blame Basques for the carnage, and text messagers attributed it to Islamists protesting Spain's involvement in the Iraq war.

People are no longer just mobile media consumers, they are mobile media creators. In the 2005 London Tube bombings, the iconic images were captured not by press photographers, but by commuters with camera phones.

Cellphones are the first telecommunications technology in history to have more users in the developing world -- almost 60 percent -- than in the West. Cellphone usage in Africa has been growing close to 50 percent annually -- faster than any other region. More than 30 African nations have more cellphones than land lines. In only 11 years, Grameenphone -- an offshoot of the Nobel Prize-winning micro-lending outfit -- now covers 98 percent of Bangladesh and serves the majority of the country's 30 million telephone users, only about a million of whom have land lines.

Even before cellphones became portals to the Web, they became the driving force behind many modernizing economies. Market women in Nigeria no longer are the vassals of their middlemen. Even before their nets are out of the water, fishermen in India can find out which port will give them the best price for their catch. Airtime minutes have become a sort of currency. Urbanites transfer them to relatives in the most remote places.