NTT DoCoMo To Study The Social Impact Of Mobile Phones
from the just-how-annoying-are-those-ringtones? dept
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.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
I don't miss the old days
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.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
impacts
[ link to this | view in thread ]