Our Cells, Ourselves

Washington Post: Our Cells, Ourselves

Planet's Fastest Revolution Speaks to The Human Heart

The home is remote, even by Tibetan standards. Charming carvings cannot disguise how primitive it is. Not only does it have no toilet, it doesn't have an outhouse. Or even a designated hole in the ground. It does, however, boast one very great prize -- a ringing cellphone.

Why?

"That is exactly the question I kept asking," says Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, who is writing a book about "what technology wants." The house at which he stayed -- which featured a space under it to shelter the family dzo, a yak-cow hybrid -- was "probably as large as my own. So they could build shelters. But they didn't build toilets. Went in the barnyard, like their livestock. But man, they have better cellphone coverage than we do at home. Communication, not cleanliness, is next to godliness."

Apparently so. The human race is crossing a line. There is now one cellphone for every two humans on Earth.

From essentially zero, we've passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about 26 years. This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history -- faster even than the polio vaccine. ...

Comments

[Dana Ames]

Wow.

D.

[Michael W. Kruse]

I'll say it backwards.

Wow!

:) Pretty amazing stuff.

[Andy]

My congregation has a mission partnership with a church in rural northeastern India. Mail is unreliable; internet access is seriously iffy. But they call all the time. And as in much of the developing world, e-mail means text messaging.

[Michael W. Kruse]

As I understand it, while text messaging can be expensive in Western nations, voice communication is cheap. It works the opposite in developing nations. It'd be nice to get us all on the same page (or at least cell phone plan.)