NTT DoCoMo To Study The Social Impact Of Mobile Phones

from the just-how-annoying-are-those-ringtones? dept

Mon, Apr 5th 2004 12:46pm — Mike Masnick

Japanese mobile phone company NTT DoCoMo has set up an entire research institute to study the social impact of mobile phone usage. Specifically, they're going to look at "impact on society and culture, legal systems, industry impact and mobile phones as a social infrastructure." Despite being funded by a mobile phone carrier, they claim that the institute will look for both positive and negative impacts of the technology, but the goal will be on using those results to help promote the upside and minimize the downside. At last, we might find out just how annoyed the average person is by those people chatting away around them.

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dorpus, 5 Apr 2004 @ 2:41pm

I don't miss the old days
How about them old days of spending hours standing by pay phones, waiting for someone to call you when you're not at home? Voice mail that takes days to reach the intended recipient.

Or the old days of Japan, where installing a new phone line took a few months and cost $800? Each household was only "allowed" to have one telephone (issued by the phone company), so people wrapped it in cloth like a holy relic.
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chuka junior, 7 Feb 2007 @ 8:13am

impacts
how are we identifying the bad impacts of mobile phones on us and the society both now and in the future?
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