Re: <nettime> Re: Cellpohones and the cancer of cellspace

["scotartt" <scot@systemx.autonomous.org>]

From: 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.


where does this idea come from? I don't see this similarity. CBs don't use
time switched multiplexing. They don't frequency hop. They don't
continually communicate with a central computer to tell it where it is. In
fact, there's no central broadcasting element at all in the CB model. CBs
aren't switched -- a very important feature of the telephone system that
cellphones possess. Also when you send a message on a CB, although your
communication is one-to-one, anyone tuned to that channel can hear it --
its *effectively* a public broadcast, even if you don't mean it to be. GSM
Mobile phones skip through frequencies and cells even mid conversation
(especially if you're moving) and make it very difficult for anyone to
track your conversation (plus the fact that the back-channel is on an
altogether different frequency).

Just because it has a radio component does not a 'radio' make.

regs
scot




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