In one well-publicized example of cellphone warfare, one passenger was arrested on assault and harassment charges after an argument with other passengers who annoyed him with their phone chatter.
Jan Chipchase and his user-research colleagues at Nokia can rattle off example upon example of the cellphone's ability to increase people's productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached.
He does, however, provide us with one of the most inventive cinematic examples of death by cellphone.
To sidestep the government's blocking of the Internet and curbing of cellphone access, for example, some of the more active antigovernment protesters distribute flash drives and CDs with videos of the fighting to friends in other towns and to journalists.
One Interphone study, for example, found that after a decade of cellphone use, the chance of getting a brain tumor goes up as much as 40% for adults.
Here are a few other examples of how the dance between cellphone companies and their customers is, to use Professor Nalebuff's term, "weird": When Apple and AT&T started offering the iPhone for $199, plus $30 a month for Internet access, sales shot up, even though the previous deal — $399 for the phone and $20 a month — cost less over a two-year contract.
The department maintains a state-by-state tally of cellphone laws that shows, for example, that Kentucky already bans cellphone use by drivers under 18 and by bus drivers.
During an emergency, he said, the tendency "is for the government to want to control people and to seize things," citing drive-through restaurants, hospitals and cellphones as examples of what the state or county might appropriate for its own use in such a situation.
The best example of this are cellphone networks in Africa and how absolutely transformative that business model has been for everybody's lives across the continent.
Describing each of us as the subject of "ubiquitous surveillance," Hu cited routine monitoring of social media profiles on sites like Facebook along with the capturing of cellphone metadata (e.g. location, call duration) as two examples of this trend.
