The Wireless Report

1. http://www.dealsdepot.com.au


Fascinating article. I was especially interested in those categories they included. I fit into that middle category of 30 year olds, I suppose. There wasn’t much comment about the possibility of setting different songs for different callers. Perhaps if one of your songs defines you, it’s assumed the others will be in a similar vein. It does seem, though, that this article says a number of interesting things about society today. First, it suggests that we all feel the need to define ourselves with our own sort of music – as though we have a personal soundtrack for our lives. We want to feel as though we are in a movie, with a particular sort of music playing in the background. But so too it seems to say something about how we’ve all become critics. What has American Idol wrought, that we now feel as though the world is our own personal rating game.

Posted at 10:50PM on May 24th 2007 by Mobile Phones

2. One of the more interesting things suggested by your post is the way we all seem to be redefining our personal space. Physical space, obviously, has always mattered. It makes a difference how close the next person is sitting to us on the subway. However, we are beginning to think about space in a whole new way now that suddenly sound has entered the equation. There was some interest in this problem in the early days of boom boxes, but the rapid rise in Walkmans and the Ipods has made the intrusion of personal music rare. Yet phones have begun to re-start the conversation about how or whether sound can violate personal space. Are we entitled to certain sound privacy beyond privacy of our physical person? After all, even if we put our phones on vibrate so there’s no music, we still spend our days listening to other people’s conversations. Does it violate my rights to have to listen to some girl sobbing to her boyfriend about how he didn’t call her last night, or some guy complaining about the Thai food he had for lunch?

Posted at 11:57PM on Jun 11th 2007 by Mobile Phones