Currently on the reading pile, for some upcoming work, and this one is kinda interesting, especially coming at it in (early) 2024.
Because this book was published in 2004, twenty years ago, and the entire history of the smartphone hadn’t even happened yet.
This is a history of the cellphone, the ubiquitous pocket device, as it appeared in the era of Y2K and The Matrix movies. Of Nokia bricks, and flip phones and Razrs and maybe even a Blackberry or 3.
And it’s fascinating because of it.
I can’t go into too much detail about the current project, but the short version is that it’s about what changed with the arrival of the iPhone, and how our culture shifted.
But in order to figure that out, we need to know what it was like in the before times. And here Paul Levinson’s book does a wonderful job.
The most interesting part (for me) is Chapter 11, Future Calls, the speculative chapter about where the cellphone might be headed. But even in doing so, he shows how much of the current use of the phone showed up as early as 19`14, in various texts and comics, and it was only through some historical accidents that we didn’t get videophone development until much later. The picturephone has been floating around as an idea for nearly 100 years, even though now we take it for granted.
Much of the reason for the lack of development was the lack of interest: people couldn’t imagine them using it, and feared being seen on camera. It took half a century of television as passive entertainment, and the audience being accustomed to talking naturally on the phone to being comfortable with talking “face-to-face” as well.
So, I think this is a keeper, and I might have to track down a personal copy. This one was a serendipitous find at the local public library, and I grabbed a few others I’ll need to talk about soon too.
Levinson, P. (2004). Cellphone: The story of the world’s most mobile medium and how it has transformed everything! New York, N.Y. : Palgrave Macmillan.