Constant Touch Read Free Page A

Rwandan rebels. As the price of tantalum increased, the civil war intensified, funded by the profits of coltan export. The mobile phone manufacturers are distanced, however, from the conflict. Firms such as Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung and Motorola buy capacitors from separate manufacturers, who in turn buy raw material from intermediaries. On each exchange, the source of tantalum becomes more deniable. ‘All you can do is ask, and if they say no, we believe it,’ Outi Mikkonen, communications manager for environmental affairs at Nokia, recently said of her firm’s suppliers. On the other hand, export of tantalum from Uganda and Rwanda has multiplied twentyfold in the period of civil war, and the element is going somewhere.
    To build a single cellphone requires material resources from across the globe. The tantalum in the capacitors might come from Australia or the Congo. The nickel in my battery probably originated from a minein Chile. The microprocessor chips and circuitry may be from North America. The plastic casing and the liquid in the liquid crystal display were manufactured from petroleum products, from the Gulf, Texas, Russia or the North Sea, and moulded into shape in Taiwan. The collected components would have been assembled in factories dotted around the world. While the work might be coordinated from a corporate headquarters – Ericsson’s base is in Sweden, Nokia’s in Finland, Siemens’ in Germany, Alcatel’s in France, Samsung’s in Korea, Apple’s and Motorola’s in the United States, and Sony’s, Toshiba’s and Matsushita’s in Japan – the finished phone could have come from secondary manufacturers in many other countries.
    The phone might be an international conglomerate, but it was put together in different ways in different countries, and shortly we will see how the cellular phone was imagined in different ways according to national context. I will return later to consider what the mobile tells us about our culture that has adopted it so readily. I will ask how the mobile cellphone fits with changing social structures, why it has become the focus of new types of crime, and what it can signify when it appears in cultural products such as television programmes and movies. For material components alone do not add up to a working cellphone. Indeed, it was the scarcity of a non-material resource that prompted the idea of the cellular phone in the first place.
    Chapter 2
Save the ether
    WhenLars Magnus Ericsson was driving through the Swedish countryside, he still had to stop his car and wire his car-bound telephone to the overhead lines. If he had pressed his foot on the accelerator, the wire would have whipped out, wrecking the apparatus. It was not a mobile phone in our current sense of the word. Until the last decades of the 20th century, most telephones were like this: to use them, you had to stand still, because you were physically connected by inelastic copper wire to the national system. A few privileged people – members of the armed forces, engineers, ship captains – could command the use of a true wireless phone, connecting to the land-locked national system through radio. The reason it was a privilege was because the radio telephone had to fight for a share of a scarce resource: a place on the radio spectrum.
    The first radio transmissions were profligate beasts. Take Marconi’s again. Such radio waves generated by a spark would crackle across many frequencies on the spectrum, interfering with and swamping other attempts at communication. This problem meant that early radio users had a choice: either find some way of regulating use so that interference was limited, or take achance with a chaotic Babel of cross-talk. The route to regulation was taken. (Although not in all parts of the world: for many decades Italian radio was the liveliest in the world.) But even when radio circuits became more tuneable, so that radio transmissions