Are you? I’m not entirely sure I am, even though I think about this a lot.
If you’re of the tech-savvy kind, you’re certainly aware of the great capabilities that the new mobile phone generation is bringing: Internet connection, a quite decent browser, GPS, camera, etc. But, really.. did you stop to think about what’s going on? This phone generation is still relatively expensive today, but they’re here to stay, and in just a few years, they’ll be commonplace.
Now, let’s forget about ourselves for a moment, and think about what mass adoption of a quite capable generic computer with full internet connectivity 24h a day being carried with its owner means for the world? Remember, the number of mobile phone users in the world is several times superior to the number of computers, and most of the computers are in the so called first world.
This implies that not only will everyone have access to the world in their pockets, which is already quite amazing by itself, but that a large number of people will have access to the Internet at all for the first time with their mobiles. Besides the several social impacts that these changes will bring, there are also many other interesting consequences. As simple examples, the most common client to many web services will be mobile phones, and many people will learn to use a touch screen interface of the mobile to interact with the world before ever having used a desktop computer for that.
I find that amazing, and this is happening right now, in front of our eyes.
I’m in. Being preaching it for a while now. I’m ready to stop thinking about it and actually make a mobile site as a matter of fact. Just for fun. http://www.bearfruit.org/search/node/mobile looks like I’ve been thinking / talking about it too long as a matter of fact. :-) Time for action.
In Being Digital, from 1995, Nicholas Negroponte said exactly that about the mobile phone revolution and the Internet access.
I agree, it’s a wonderful new world. And it deserves a series of articles in itself. Maybe a book…
Here come the masses :-)
hey gustavo – i wholeheartedly agree – see also http://tetamap.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/mobiles-python-pypy-and-the-zone-vm/ … really hope we collaborate some time on some of the ideas or visions we share :)
holger
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