Mobile phone addiction
Reports of Ofcom figures on mobile use suggest we are addicted to them, but shouldn’t we question this coverage as misanthropic?
The list of things we supposed to be addicted to seems to be increasingly wide, including shopping, sex, gambling and video games. There isn’t any need to be alarmist about the widespread use of mobile phones, which follows similarly alarmist talk when television was first introduced. Rather than addiction, maybe the explanation is more about keeping up with the fast pace of political change after Brexit and Trump. Perhaps the mobile phone is helping us keep in touch with family and friends rather than it being a barrier to the same.
The mobile phone is more of a mediator in wider social trends like working long hours, commuting long hours and experiencing greater economic security. Rather than Ofcom indicting us for being addicted to mobile phones, maybe they should be less complacent about the patchy infrastructure serving us 4G connections, which in many places is poor or none existent.
Innovators I like
Robert Furchgott – discovered that nitric oxide transmits signals within the human body
Barry Marshall – showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is the cause of most peptic ulcers, reversing decades of medical doctrine holding that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid
N Joseph Woodland – co-inventor of the barcode
Jocelyn Bell Burnell – she discovered the first radio pulsars
John Tyndall – the man who worked out why the sky was blue
Rosalind Franklin co-discovered the structure of DNA, with Crick and Watson
Rosalyn Sussman Yallow – development of radioimmunoassay (RIA), a method of quantifying minute amounts of biological substances in the body
Jonas Salk – discovery and development of the first successful polio vaccine
John Waterlow – discovered that lack of body potassium causes altitude sickness. First experiment: on himself
Werner Forssmann – the first man to insert a catheter into a human heart: his own
Bruce Bayer – scientist with Kodak whose invention of a colour filter array enabled digital imaging sensors to capture colour
Yuri Gagarin – first man in space. My piece of fandom: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/10421
Sir Godfrey Hounsfield – inventor, with Robert Ledley, of the CAT scanner
Martin Cooper – inventor of the mobile phone
George Devol – 'father of robotics’ who helped to revolutionise carmaking
Thomas Tuohy – Windscale manager who doused the flames of the 1957 fire
Eugene Polley – TV remote controls
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