Cell phones. Text messages. These are dirty words, say some, marking the end of the telephone. A phone is a phone. It isn't a camera, a navigational device or any other of those high tech things that computer whizzes are cooking up these days.
"Why don't you just call a person?" asks my dad in response to text messaging, a tinge of his New York accent still lingering.
Texting is more ubiquitous than the Beatles in the '60s, more than teased hair in the '80s, more than Uggs this season. Americans paid $70 billion--more than three times as much as the year's Hollywood ticket sales--in text messaging fees in 2005, according to an NPR report.
And there's good news: it's starting to pay off. In one case, a text message alert system prevented students of Hope College in Holland, Mich. from succumbing to a norovirus outbreak. The mass text message sent instructions to the college's 3,600 students, telling them what they could do to avoid spreading the virus.
And in another, more remarkable case, a doctor in the Democratic Republic of Congo successfully performed an arm amputation last month aided by his colleague via text message. David Nott had never performed the forequarter amputation, in which the collar bone and shoulder blade are removed, that a 16-year-old shooting victim needed.
"So he did what all of us do when faced with a tricky situation," Asylum blogger Matt Glazebrook wrote. "He texted a friend." Citing the operation's apparent success, Glazebrook went so far as to suggest the last text message in Nott's dialogue was probably a smiley emoticon.
The ever expanding utility of these devices and features used to be considered a luxury. It's no wonder that telecommunications thrive all over the world, even in the Democratic Republic of Congo, even in lawless and pirate-ridden Somalia. Cell phones and text messaging are here for better or for worse. And with more stories like these, it just might be for better.
"Why don't you just call a person?" asks my dad in response to text messaging, a tinge of his New York accent still lingering.
Texting is more ubiquitous than the Beatles in the '60s, more than teased hair in the '80s, more than Uggs this season. Americans paid $70 billion--more than three times as much as the year's Hollywood ticket sales--in text messaging fees in 2005, according to an NPR report.
And there's good news: it's starting to pay off. In one case, a text message alert system prevented students of Hope College in Holland, Mich. from succumbing to a norovirus outbreak. The mass text message sent instructions to the college's 3,600 students, telling them what they could do to avoid spreading the virus.
And in another, more remarkable case, a doctor in the Democratic Republic of Congo successfully performed an arm amputation last month aided by his colleague via text message. David Nott had never performed the forequarter amputation, in which the collar bone and shoulder blade are removed, that a 16-year-old shooting victim needed.
"So he did what all of us do when faced with a tricky situation," Asylum blogger Matt Glazebrook wrote. "He texted a friend." Citing the operation's apparent success, Glazebrook went so far as to suggest the last text message in Nott's dialogue was probably a smiley emoticon.
The ever expanding utility of these devices and features used to be considered a luxury. It's no wonder that telecommunications thrive all over the world, even in the Democratic Republic of Congo, even in lawless and pirate-ridden Somalia. Cell phones and text messaging are here for better or for worse. And with more stories like these, it just might be for better.
Leave a comment