The poor old International Telecommunications Union toils away without getting much press in the mainstream media even though some of the stuff they come up with is just downright neat and would be great fodder for all kids of feature reporting. Today, the ITU reports on a workshop it held to assess the social impacts of mobile telephones. I did not realize, for one thing, that the number of mobile telephone subscribers worldwide was greater than the total number of fixed-line users around the world. At the end of 2002, there were 1.35 billion mobile phone users compared to 1.2 billion fixed line phone users.
At this workshop, experts from different countries talked about how mobile telephony was re-shaping social conventions and the way people interacted with each other. For instance:
- In Germany, young men who do not use SMS to reaffirm their love for their partners soon find themselves lonely.
- In Sweden, mobile gamers (“Botfighters”) track and “kill” other users nearby via SMS. When riding the Stockholm subway, SMS can also alert a small group of “fare-jumpers” to the presence of ticket collectors.
- In the Republic of Korea, downloading anti-mosquito ring tones helps to making camping a more pleasant experience while traffic alerts delivered to in-car navigation systems help Koreans to arrive at the camps-sites in good time