Unprecedentedly free? Or permanently tethered?

From essentially zero, we've passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about 26 years.
This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history -- faster even than the polio vaccine.


"We knew this was going to happen a few years ago. And we know how it will end," says Eric Schmidt, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Google. "It will end with 5 billion out of the 6" with cellphones. "A reasonable prediction is 4 billion in the next few years -- the current proposal is 4 billion by 2010. And then the final billion or so within a few years thereafter.


"Eventually there will be more cellphone users than people who read and write. I think if you get that right, then everything else becomes obvious."


"It's the technology most adapted to the essence of the human species -- sociability," says Arthur Molella, director of the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. "It's the ultimate tool to find each other. It's wonderful technology for being human."


Maybe. But do our mobiles now render us unprecedentedly free? Or permanently tethered?