<nettime> Re: Cellpohones and the cancer of cellspace

[robert adrian <rax@thing.at>]

M. Wark wrote:
>Cellphones are not the Internet. Theyre a different medium. Just as
>interactive TV shows were not a big hit on TV, browsing the Web is not
>going to be a big hit on cellphones. Its a new medium that calls, not for
>"content", but for form.

Cellphones are not necessarily "the telephone" either: The cellphone
(known as the "handy" in Central Europe) is actually more like radio - in
the original sense of wireless communication - than telephone. Its direct
ancestry is therefore closer to CB than to Ma Bell. In this sense radio
returns - via the handy - to its un-programmed origins as a medium of
one-to-one communication after 75 years of domination by the
"broadcasting" industry.

------------

>Why is America so far behind in cellphone culture? For once, the free
>market has failed to deliver. Where the United States has competing
>technical standards promoted by different companies, in most of the rest
>of the world there were national phone companies that mandated a common
>technical standard: GSM.

An important reason that computer networking (whether BBS or internet) was
so succesfull so early in North America was the fact that local telephone
calls are free - included in the flat-rate. This meant - and still means -
that you can connect via modem to a local server free in North America
while in Europe and other parts of the world you must pay for local calls
in addition to ISP charges. This has been a serious impediment to popular
internet growth, at least in Europe. But the same factor (free local
calls) - so helpful with the growth of the internet - makes the handy seem
expensive to N.Americans. Pagers, almost unknown in Europe, are very cheap
and convenient for N.Americans with unlimited pay-phone time for a quarter
(in Europe pay-phones are also charged by the second). It is always
difficult to convince people that they should pay for something that is
already free - so it will take a while for the cellphone to be seen as
much more than a costly toy for the average N.American customer.



______________robert adrian_____________




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