A useful invention becoming a menace
AUG 16, 2004A useful invention becoming a menace
By Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
PRIME Minister Goh Chok Tong's tale of the woman who was desperate for financial help but ran up exorbitant mobile phone bills - 'Must talk lah!' - comes to mind as Britain, too, tries to control a utility that threatens to turn into a menace.
Of course, cellphones have their uses, especially in emergencies. In South Korea, parents can now check their children's movements through a mobile phone with a built-in tracker using the global positioning satellite network.
But in any crowded room, no matter how august the occasion, a piercing ringing or staccato chirping will break out of bag or pocket. The ensuing swell of 'Shhh!' can be just as infuriating.
'What we need is a mobile phone jammer as in Singapore and Hong Kong,' a Londoner told me. The impression prevails that everyone in East Asia is armed with a device that he jabs at the noise offender and - hey presto! - the most animated conversation is cut off in full spate.
But it's the British who are now poised to market what promises to be the ultimate silencer.
An organisation called Qinetiq, a British Defence Ministry research team before it was privatised, has designed an intricately patterned metal grid called the Frequency Selective Screen (FSS) that filters certain radio signals.
Camouflaged as wallpaper, it may be installed in hospital wards, theatres and in high-security zones where a mobile phone might be used to set off an explosive.
There is also a move afoot to extend last year's law forbidding drivers from using handheld mobile phones to hands-free car phones. The logic is that the danger arises from the distraction of a conversation when the driver should focus only on the road.
Research in the United States, where drivers talk a billion minutes a day on their mobile phones (40 per cent of all cellphone calls), shows that wireless earphones don't make driving any safer. No doubt, the law can tackle this problem.
But what of the contrast between talkathons and the dying art of conversation?
I am baffled at needs that are so pressing as to demand instant discussion regardless of time, place and occasion.
Shop assistants jabber away, fist clutched at one ear, while customers wait patiently. People cross roads talking, impervious to traffic. Students whisper into cellphones in libraries.
Many a meal must be burnt to cinders while the housewife is busy chatting instead of keeping an eye on what's cooking.
Worst of all, everything that should remain private has become public. Passengers in the London Underground have all manner of intimate information thrust upon them by determined mobile phone users on all sides.
'I told you to sell,' thunders a man to his investment broker. 'Oh Jeff, please!' pleads a girl with her hard-hearted boyfriend. 'She never helps with the housework,' complains a woman about her daughter. 'It's me, Mum,' grumbles a boy.
I watched a member in animated conversation in one of India's most exalted clubs, oblivious of the bearer holding up a 'Please switch off your mobile phone' sign only a few centimetres from his nose.
No other invention can so drastically have reshaped human nature. The mobile phone has torn away all sense of privacy. It has stripped people of sensitivity, perhaps even of shame. Secret joys and sorrows are uninhibitedly shared with all the world.
Globally, there are 1.3 billion mobile phone users today. The number in the British Isles has soared from nine million to 50 million in six years.
Astonishingly, nearly a quarter of British children aged between seven and 10 have their own mobile phones, and one in three is a cellphone addict, sunk in depression if no calls are received.
I read once of a four-year-old pointing out a roadside telephone kiosk to his grandfather with the explanation: 'That's where you go if you don't have a mobile.'
The Trappist ideal of silence may be left far behind, but there is hope yet. Worldwide asylums papered in FSS, like wartime air-raid shelters, might save the rest of us from the depredations of an invincible new talkathon generation.
Qinetiq deserves to make a fortune.
Copyright @ 2004 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.
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