One day there will be a telephone in every major town in America. So ran the prediction of Alexander Graham Bell when asked for his thoughts on the potential success of the communications device he patented in 1876. You can see where he was coming from - the prospect of trailing wires across thousands of miles of countryside must have seemed like a bit of an inconvenience - but time has shown his prediction to have been somewhat modest. It’s like the inventor of chips declaring that they would only ever be eaten by his mum.
The full scale of the telephone’s 130 year march to domination was revealed this week by the UN. The survey, published on Monday by the International Telecommunications Union - a specialised agency of the UN, based in Geneva - found that more than half the world now boasts a mobile in its pocket. The figure has risen sharply since 2002, when the number of portable phone contracts hit a global total of 1bn.
Today there are 4.1bn, an unfathomably complex network sending sound, text and related data amongst itself and placing instant communication at the fingertips of the lion’s share of our species.
Recent suggestions that most of that data is being sent to Twitter are unsubstantiated, but either way, the numbers are impressive. Bell could have barely dreamed of an era in which a message could travel from England to Tanzania with the push of a few buttons.
“Yo Aailyah how r u?! Stil snowin here lol!! Luv Shaz xx ps tell Abasi he is well fit”
As a matter of fact, Bell’s got a lot to answer for. Because if there’s one downside to the incredible ease with which we can get in touch, it’s that mankind’s collective stockpile of mindless guff is growing at an exponential rate. At least when everything was written on paper, people put a bit of effort in. Modern technology means our innermost thoughts have barely made their way across our brains before they are flung out into the ether. It’s a good job the whole lot boils down to little more than binary data, or we’d have one hell of a job working out where to put it.
It was all fine and dandy back in the Dark Ages. Nobody bothered staying in touch with distant friends and relatives back then, because nobody had distant friends and relatives. Most people’s social circle involved a couple of sheep, some trees and the bloke who lived in the next hut. The exception was members of the royal family, who were encouraged to look further afield for partners once they’d run out of cousins.
Communication wasn’t easy back then. If for some obscure reason somebody needed to send a message to the neighbouring village - “plague again lol” - their best bet was to carve it into a root vegetable, strap that to a donkey and shove it off in the appropriate direction. Nine times out of ten the donkey would end up eating the message or stumbling into a swamp, and on the rare occasions it finally made it to its destination, everyone would already have the plague. It wasn’t an efficient system.
These days we have it easy. Parts of rural Britain still adhere to the donkey method - we have always been a country of traditionalists - but a good 4.1bn of us enjoy swift and convenient conversation with whichever of the other 4,099,999,999 we happen to have stored in our contacts lists.
It’s an incredible idea. Mankind progressed from dirt-chewing cave dwellers to, well, whatever it is we are now, via communication and collaboration, yet to date only a tiny proportion of society has had the ability to easily reach beyond its geographical limits, and a smaller proportion still has had the means to build upon what it learned. Ever so suddenly, the model which defined our past has changed completely.
99 per cent of what we say may be noise and dust, but hidden in that endless cloud are flecks of gold.
Now, for the first time in our history, they belong to half the Earth.
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Three years ago, I became the guild master of a young Ahn’Qiraj guild. I was just a few months into my first MMO experience, a bewildered level 49 warlock who would wipe 5-man instances by fearing the wrong mobs. In the time that followed, I saw a group of fantasy friends grow, shrink and strengthen, bond through countless hours of shared indulgence in the most addictive of hobbies. And the interaction moved from text, to speech, to real life.
