One of the (longer) readings that has come from the mobile blogsphere has been a piece called Everything You Wanted to Ask About Mobile But Were Afraid To Ask by Tomi Ahonen (Communities Dominate Brands, Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media, etc.). This piece is an excellent primer towards mobile from a high (and probably nearly mid-)level perspective, and yet is about the right kind of perspective that’s needed for such a field. Here’s a snippet of that piece:
…And do remember, that is global numbers. Two thirds of the planet means we now cover people who are refugees from wars, living in poverty etc. On the planet there are 800 million people of reading age who are illiterate, 1.6 billion people live beyond the reach of electricity, and 900 million are children under the age of 7. There are more people with mobile phones than have access to running water. More mobile phone subscribers on the planet than use a toothbrush (its true!). Yet even across all these hardships, the mobile has spread so rapidly that there was a mobile phone for two thirds of the planet at the start of this year, and will be 75% of planet Earth’s population by the end of this year…
It is no longer an issue of whether mobile is here, now it’s time to address our perceptions and possibilities because it is.