Mobile madness hits the father from hell
20 January 2008
If we produce a billion mobile phones a year, some would say that this is due to market forces, others might suggest that it is too many for a saturated market, while another group might suggest that this is too many because they are devices with unproven safety. And despite the physical difficulties this would involve, I have a foot in all three camps…..
In the third quarter last year the number of mobile phones shipped was 281 million (according to figures from market analyst IDC), an increase of nearly 14% over the same period in 2006. Although figures are not available for the fourth quarter, including the Christmas sales, we can extrapolate the numbers to assume that there were well over a billion phones sold in 2007. Given that the world’s population is 6.6 billion, this seems an awful lot of phones coming off the production lines, particularly as the majority of people who want and can afford a phone, and live in an area where they can be used, already have one. I know that this number of people is rapidly expanding and I also know that for some people last year’s phone is as acceptable as yesterday’s news, but still it seems like an awful lot of phones coming off the production lines.
In fact, there is almost a hint of heads being buried in the sand. As happened at the beginning of this millennium, over-capacity was everywhere, as was obvious in hindsight, but we had to wait until the bottom fell out of the market before we realised it. Is the same thing going to happen to the mobile phone industry? When there is such a tussle for market share then no company is going to step back from the fray on the grounds of responsible market forecasting, so I suspect, whether it is this year, five or ten years time, it will take a market crash to stabilise the market.
However, my thoughts above were really a knee-jerk reaction to the production figures for mobile phones, which I was looking into as background for another story that I was following up. This was a story I noticed in a national newspaper about some recent research into the effects of mobile phone usage on sleep. The research indicated that using a mobile phone before going to bed did have an effect on the quality of sleep as a consequence of some rogue radiation. It affects ‘deep non-REM sleep’ apparently. Despite the survey being carried out on 18 – 45 year olds, the newspaper went to a sleep therapist who said that such sleep deprivation in teenagers could cause mood and personality changes, academic failure and lack of concentration, and therefore ran a headline saying that mobile phones were bad for children. Why let the facts get in the way of a good story?
Now, to my way of thinking the description of a teenager as being an academic failure, with poor concentration and having personality changes has been a fairly accurate one in this generation and any other one in the past – long before the advent of mobile phones. And to draw the above conclusions about children on a study of only 71 adults is bordering on the sensationalist.
However, I still, as a parent of a teenage daughter, have doubts about the long term safety of mobile phones. Without being cast as the father from Hades, there is no way that I could deprive my daughter of a phone, but I am quite keen to monitor and limit the amount of time she spends on it – and despite my doubts about the validity of the newspaper’s reporting and conclusions, I was not above using as ammunition!
The thing that troubles me is the acceptance that there is not a problem. It is a bit like smoking, although in that case it is different because there is a proven link to ill health. Smoking still seems to be an accepted evil by society, despite being the biggest self-inflicted killer in mankind’s history. And smoker’s themselves take comfort in the huge number of intelligent people who also smoke and believe that it ‘won’t happen to them’.
What if the same is true of mobile phone use? Or wi-fi or any another electronic/electromagnetic device? What if extensive use of mobile phones was causing cancer or making us depressed, but the wide-spread acceptance (and undoubted usefulness) of these devices makes us want to ignore the possible consequences ?
I instinctively feel that this is not the case and that mobile phones are safe. As much research exists to suggest health issues are negligible as to suggest they are real. There is too much science, and reporting of it, that has a predetermined agenda and is often invalid as a consequence. But for the sake of every parent’s peace of mind, and so that my daughter has freer rein on her phone usage, large scale and long-term research should be done whenever there is any contentious technology introduced to the market. Had such a programme been launched at the time of the first mobile phones, we might have a definitive answer to what, if any, health risks they present.
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