Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Saw two stories today which are interrelated; the first is an article in Business Week entitled “Time to Rename the Cell Phone?” The story talks about how today’s smart phones are increasingly being used for pretty much everything except making phone calls.

Excerpt: “Amid the rise of so-called smart phones that do everything from browsing the Web to downloading and storing pictures and music, there’s a growing concern that what today we refer to as a cell phone, isn’t quite the right description for these new do-all gadgets.”

The second story is an article which proves the point of the first article; it’s from the New York Times, and is entitled “YouTube Coming Soon to Cellphones.” This story talks about a few cellphone carriers which will soon be allowing users to download YouTube videos onto their cellphones (which makes perfect sense since some of those clips were shot using cellphone video cameras in the first place).

Excerpt: “‘Everybody carries a phone with them, but they may not have a computer,’ said Steve Chen, chief technology officer and a co-founder of YouTube. People can ‘take the phone out of their pocket while waiting for the bus’ and watch a video, he added.”

So, whatever it is we call “cellphones,” it’s obvious that they have become much more than just communication devices. Or rather, the borders of what we call communication have become — in our flattened, vertical world — much more broad; it used to be that the only way you could directly communicate with someone was by picking up the phone (before that you’d have to send a telegram, but that meant getting a third party involved; the invention of the phone was the invention of true personal connection across a distance). But now you can call someone, text them, IM them, send them a video, or even post to a blog using a cellphone, and thus communicate with a whole lot of people at once. Instead of reaching out and touching someone, you can now touch the entire world. So who really cares what that’s called?

Time to Rename the Cell Phone?

YouTube Coming Soon to Cellphones