In 1986, the Guardian wrote:
By the year 2000, Mintel suggests that small pocketphones "will be as common as Walkmans… " People would have to develop a whole new social code… You could not, for example, take calls in the middle of a crowded restaurant. Indeed, the potential nuisance effect of pocketphones (which, of course, exist at the moment, but are clumsy and extremely expensive) is enormous, though perhaps no more so than the nuisance of the transistor radio. Besides, the social value of being able to make a phone call at any time will also be extremely large.
Now, the Guardian takes a look at what it means to live in Britannia Telefonica, where most people have mobiles.
"I don't care who it is, mate, rules are rules."
Pilot to Tony Blair when the prime minister protested about having to switch off his mobile as his plane was about to take off. He was taking a call from the Queen…One morning I took an early flight from Moscow to St Petersburg for an interview at the Hermitage museum. In the final stages of our descent, the fog over Petersburg was so low and thick that all we could see were the tops of factory chimneys sticking out of it. The pilot announced that we would have to divert to Pskov, a run-down garrison town near the Estonian border, 100 miles to the south. We landed, disembarked and entered the terminal building, a dank shell of gnawed concrete. The few beaten-up, inter-city call booths in the airport were closed. There was no way I would make the interview, and no way to let the Hermitage know I was late; I had lost the story.
At this point, I saw about a dozen of my fellow passengers, Russian men and women, line up like a guard of honour, and with military synchronicity, lift dinky little mobiles to their faces and reveal to the world that we had been diverted to Pskov. I was amazed at how fast technology and human want had overtaken my understanding of the possible in Russia. I was impressed that so many of the people on the flight had mobiles, when I had thought that they were luxuries for the elite of Moscow; that here, in this obscure provincial town, pretty much the property of a hungry Russian airborne division, the infrastructure to support roaming was in place; and, most of all, that everyone around me took this for granted. I borrowed one of their phones. I got straight through to the Hermitage and told them I was running late. I had to get one of these things.
(Thanks, Simon!)
