Nikki's E-learning and Digital Cultures site » Telecommunications http://edc13.education.ed.ac.uk/nikkib Nikki's E-Learning and Digital Cultures site - part of the MSc in E-learning at the University of Edinburgh Thu, 30 May 2013 09:29:15 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4.1 Dialing the future http://edc13.education.ed.ac.uk/nikkib/2013/04/03/dialing-the-future/ http://edc13.education.ed.ac.uk/nikkib/2013/04/03/dialing-the-future/#comments Wed, 03 Apr 2013 21:04:02 +0000 Nikki Bourke http://edc13.education.ed.ac.uk/nikkib/?p=575 Forty years ago, on April 3rd 1973 the first mobile phone call was made by Martin Cooper, an employee of Motorola. Since then the mobile phone has become  as essential a  part of our everyday survival kit. Glasses, driving licence, lipstick, mobile phone…

To just imagine getting through an average day without it would send shivers up most of our spines!

So where is it going to take us next?

 

Click here to view the embedded video.

 

Martin Cooper highlights the future capabilities of the machine suggesting  that in time phones will be used to flag and monitor medical conditions held within the body of the holder. Cooper believes that the minimalist look is set to continue suggesting in a 2010 interview with the BBC that:

“[T]he cellphone in the long range is going to be embedded under your skin behind your ear along with a very powerful computer who is in effect your slave”  promoting what Haraway (2000) refers to as the ambiguity created by machines “in the difference between natural and artifical, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.” (Haraway, 2000, p.36]

 

Haraway, D. (2000). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century. in D Bell and A Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge.

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