By the end of 2020 the forecast for the number of mobile phones on the planet is set at five billion. Barring a pandemic or other global catastrophe, by the end of 2020 the population of the world is expected to be eight billion souls.
That’s a lot of fucking phones, and it means that at any given time, potentially five eights of the world isn’t going to be paying attention to what’s occurring around them.
I don’t know who the three billion people are without walkabout phones. Babies, convicts and poor people I guess.
I was wondering about the number of phones for kind of an abstract reason. Last night my sister’s fat assed cat knocked her phone off her nightstand. The phone impacted the floor and promptly dialed my mobile. At three thirty in the morning. Any unexpected phone call after midnight is generally bad news, but in this instance it was a fat cat on a diet that felt compelled to cause some shit.
Anyway, I texted my sister and she confirmed she was fine and the cat was the three A.M. culprit. As I was laying in bed wondering if I was going to get back to sleep, I also wondered how many times a day that a pocket dial occurs. How many times is sleep interrupted by a cat? How many times a day does a person answer their mobile, only to hear a distant conversation taking place where the conversationalists aren’t even aware their fucking phone called someone? Someone who now has an option to listen in.
With five billion phones I’m going to guess this happens a million times a day, and that’s probably a conservative guess.
So, the question I have is with design of the phones. Why the hell would one depression of one of the outside buttons be enough to generate a call? I can’t believe the designers of these instruments aren’t aware of the number of pocket dials, but evidently they give zero fucks. Volume of calls trumps selectiveness of calls I guess.
I suggest that a design should be incorporated into the next generation mobile. A feature that makes you confirm that you actually want to place that three thirty in the morning call. A feature that takes that decision away from a toddler in daytime, or a pissed off overweight feline at night.
And now for some Canadian geography while still sort of staying on topic.
Ontario, Canada is a big place. 1,07 million square kilometers big. For sake of reference, Texas in the United States is almost 700,000 square kilometers. Ontario is roughly twice the size of France or Spain, and about four times larger than The United Kingdom. Ontario is also very near to 1,600 kilometers both North to South and East to West. Pretty much the same distance as it is from London to Rome.
If a child goes missing then an amber alert is now directed to mobile phones as well as any radio or television transmission. I get that it makes sense to get the word out to as many people as possible in as short a time as possible. But, if Nigel from Camden Town goes missing then is it a good idea to wake up Guido in Gianicolo?
Probably not. But if a child gets taken by the wrong parent in the GTA then the alert goes all the way to the Manitoba border. Again for reference, that would be equivalent to a child abducted on the Western edge of Minnesota and all the residents of Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio and New York getting the alert.
By the way, GTA is not grand theft auto. It’s the greater Toronto area.
In the last month there have been two Amber alerts in the GTA that have wakened us in the middle of the night. In both instances. it was a parent responsible for the abduction and the subsequent alert. One ended well and the other tragically.
In both cases, the police and 911 services were inundated with people in the GTA bitching about being roused from their slumber. The police have half assed shamed these people publicly by releasing transcripts and audio of the bitchers, and the media has piled on. Because a child right?
Anyway, I was wondering how the GTA would respond to a five A.M. wake up call if the alert is from Kenora or Dryden, some 1200 kilometers away from them?
For starters I’m going to guess that about three quarters or better of the GTA has no fucking clue where Dryden even is. Maybe I should amend that three quarters number. Nine tenths is probably closer to the mark, and if those people were freaking out over an amber wake up call in their own backyard then it’s fucking likely they’re going to lose their shit over a missing kid a thousand kilometers away.
Anyway, it seems that the alert people should concentrate on the immediate area. Kenora would love to help out but I think you guys have the airports covered and so in 30 hours we’ll start to look around, because that’s the driving time from Toronto to Kenora, assuming you can make the drive without sleeping.
I’m guessing that the technology is available to make the alert more localised to the abduction site, and I’m also guessing that it wouldn’t be that tough to implement.
I wonder who gets to make the Amber alert broadcast decision? I wonder if they have options? I wonder if they could send the alert to an area code? I wonder if they’re sitting in front of their computer and decide that, you know what, yeah the missing kid is from Oshawa but I’m waking up the entire fucking province. Because it’s a child’s safety, and also I’m up, so fuck everyone else.
Five billion phones though. Five, fucking, billion.
If you’re Doug Ford, Andrew Scheer, Justin Trudeau or Donnie Trump, this amber alert thing has got to be intriguing. Not for the kids, but for the fact that with one fucking keystroke you can send your message to millions and millions of people.
You could interrupt Oprah, Duck Dynasty or the superbowl and force the viewers to listen to your message before you return them to regularly scheduled programming. I think though, that any astute politician is going to realise that interrupting television might backfire and cost you votes, but the potential access to the mobile phones must have politicians drooling.
I think Dougie Ford already tried a version of getting his message to the mobile phone masses. But the target group was from phone numbers the Conservative party had collected somehow, and not the entire directory of cell phone numbers in the Province.
I expect the politicians to try and harness this potential to Marshall McLuhan the masses. It would kinda be appropriate I guess because with five billion cellular devices, the medium has become more important than the message.