This week’s Loose Wire column is about mobiles phones:
WE ALL KNOW THAT mobile phones, cellphones, hand-phones, whatever we want to call them (and shouldn’t we all be calling them the same thing?) are changing our lives. But it takes a good old-fashioned survey to wake us up to the glaring reality: They have changed who we are.
If someone had said to you 10 years ago that, in 2004, the majority of people would consider their mobile to be an “extension of their personality,” you would have been forgiven for looking sceptical and saying: “What’s a mobile?” And yet that’s exactly what German electronics giant Siemens found in a recent survey: Across Asia, sizeable percentages of folk believe their cellphone and its contents–music, games, contacts and messages–form an extension of themselves. Heaven only knows what we’ll be saying in five more years. Perhaps we’ll be sending cellphones to represent us in meetings, on dates, and make speeches on our behalf at the United Nations General Assembly.
Full text at the Far Eastern Economic Review (subscription required, trial available) or at WSJ.com (subscription required). Old columns at feer.com here.