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Cellationships by Gregers Ritzer
"Cellationships & Shagbiles" by Gregers Ritzer The next time you are on a business trip and having a meal in the hotel you are staying in, look around and count the number of people who are eating alone, and talking on their cell phones. They can't all be talking about business, sure some are, but many are trying to hold their personal relationships together by talking on their cell phones. Cell phones have become the lifeline or tether back to oved ones, home, family and friends! Cellationsihps! Unwired, but desparately trying to stay connected. I googled this term I coined and got no results, so I guess this is original, and recently real for many people. Given this recent trend, phone companies are poised to make not so small fortunes by creating services which cater to this trend, manifesting a basic personal need to stay connected. more googling resulted in the recognition of a term "Cell Phone Nation". In fact there is a "cell phone nation article, housed in the Time Digital archives. However, the interesting stuff in this article was not the technology, but the trend identification of who is reacting to this new phenomena. For example, Yahoo Mobile.com, or Microsoft's MSN Moble. Another key service they mention is UReach whose mantra is calls, messages, life, and which offers: -Toll free numbers -Internet faxing -Single mailbox for voice mail, email and faxes The audiences they target are consumers, small business, travellers, salespeople, and consultants. But this to me in not the pressure point for people handling the personal disconnects in their lives. How do you maintain personal relationships, or make new relationships outside of the people you have to work with, if you are constantly on the road! This is where something like a a cell supported version of MeetUp make be a hit with cell phone users. The current version of MeetUp lets any Internet user setup "meetups", which are posted on the meetup website which are organized by location. So for example you know you are going to be in Houstan when the next version of the Lord of the Rings is released and you want to go to the bar after it, or to a restraunt with other ring lovers! Meetup provides the mechanism, and maybe it could do the same for cell users! Tokyo Research on the Effect of Cell Phone on Relationships some of the idea posted at the above log I found interesting were: -cell phone versions of online dating, like most of these things women don't pay -parental alienation, the idea the non-techno parents cannot understand their children's relationhships that only exist via cell conversation, but to them are the key to coping OK, obviously this question is not one that can be anwered at any one point in time, it is organic and dynamic reflecting how people's use of cell phones will evolve through time. Got a link relevant to this topic from The Lost Olive, who got it from Joi Ito, who got it from her sister, which if I am not mistaken, takes you back to my original link to the Ketai Log above, however, the report that she references is a PDF file A new term introduced in the above PDF Motorola study is the "Shagbile". In the study, it was noted that a number of people keep two cell phones, one for business and one for extramarital affairs, which one interviewee referred to as his 'Shagbile". And some other time I will post some more thoughts on this topic!
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