Andrew Avella
Nicole Short
ENG 170
29 April 2020
Cell Phone Project Proposal
With this paper, I’m aiming to research the cell phone. Smart phones have become one of the most popular pieces of digital technology today. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the iPhones and Androids of the world have become more popular than the television or radio. Considering phones are a personal device unlike TVs, smartphones may have the sheer numbers advantage. Whether that’s true or not, the ubiquity of cell phones cannot be denied and a deep dive into how they came about and evolved could inform how technology continues to develop into the future.
I plan to begin with the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X: a brick that is also known as the first commercial handheld mobile phone. A short article entitled 5 Inventors of the Cell Phone Honored for Wiring the World briefly recounts some simple yet useful information about Motorola’s device. It may be prudent to briefly discuss it’s predecessors, such as the landline, pager, radio, or even the telegram or horse-bound messages. Carrying a message via horse and/or ship is a far cry from sending a one across the world in seconds today. As well, I might include mention of the pager which, looking back, is an strange yet interesting footnote in the history of communications.
In my scavenge for references, I found an article written by Peter V. Paul almost jumping the fence in its title: The Digital Generation: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. This article is quite plainly sectioned off into what is good, bad, and even worse about the internet more generally. Seeing how connected the smartphone is to the internet, I don’t find it a stretch to consider Paul’s discussion of Facebook, Google, and the like to also be a discussion of the modern day smartphone. It’s likely that I’ll try and outline why it is I think that mobile phones have been an overall benefit to society.
Another article I’d like to talk about is WIRELESS WORLD: Happy birthday, Mr. Cell Phone – Thirty years have been good to the cell phone, but it still has a ways to go, written by Ephraim Schwartz. Whereas the rise of home computers allowed people to ask Yahoo anything, the accessibility and convenience of discovery via handheld phones has been life saving, if not just nice to have. Specifically, Schwartz mentions an incident in which AccuWeather subscribers in Brazil were warned of frosty weather. People informed of this weather bought up coffee and were able to resell it after the price nearly doubled from $1.40 per pound to $2.60 per pound. This occurred in 1994, as the internet was just coming to be. If a similar event were to happen today, the immediacy of phone notifications could notify millions of people with little more effort than it would take to tell someone that information.
Distracted driving as a result of phone use is a big issue I plan on bringing up. An article by Yan Tian and James D. Robinson called Predictors of Cell Phone Use in Distracted Driving: Extending the Theory of Planned Behavior talks about cell phone use while driving. The introduction is a useful aggregation of numerous statistics and other facts such as how hands-free use still predicates a safety problem.
Perhaps a more peculiar use for an iPhone would be to diagnose concussions. Erin Walkinshaw wrote a news piece about such an app aptly titled: iPhone app an aid in diagnosing concussions. The app isn’t a magic wand you can wave to find out if someone received a concussion. It has someone answer a few questions and tells the user whether they might want to seek medical attention or not. In the bigger picture, I’m positive that the ability of anyone with a smartphone to find out important medical information (I.E. did I ingest poison and how to drive to the nearest hospital) in a timely manner has saved lives.
Works Cited
Hopkins, Christopher Snow. “5 Inventors of the Cell Phone Honored for Wiring the World.” National Journal Daily, Atlantic Media, Inc., Feb. 2013.
Paul, Peter V. “The Digital Generation: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” American Annals of the Deaf, vol. 157, no. 5, 2013, pp. 407–11, doi:10.1353/aad.2013.0000.
Schwartz, Ephraim. “WIRELESS WORLD: Happy Birthday, Mr. Cell Phone – Thirty Years Have Been Good to the Cell Phone, but It Still Has a Ways to Go.(a Talk with Inventor, Marty Cooper).” InfoWorld, vol. 25, no. 14, InfoWorld Media Group, Inc., Apr. 2003.
Tian, Yan, and James D. Robinson. “Predictors of Cell Phone Use in Distracted Driving: Extending the Theory of Planned Behavior.” Health Communication, vol. 32, no. 9, Routledge, Sept. 2017, pp. 1066–75, doi:10.1080/10410236.2016.1196639.
Walkinshaw, Erin. “iPhone App an Aid in Diagnosing Concussions.” CMAJ: Canadian Medical Association Journal = Journal de l’Association Medicale Canadienne, vol. 183, no. 14, Oct. 2011, pp. E1047–E1048, doi:10.1503/cmaj.109-3942.