Hello all,
I just came across the following quote from a Newsweek article on the interaction between the US troops in Iraq and the local people. The quote is:
“If you see someone with a cell phone," said one of the commanders, half-jokingly, "put a bullet in their f---ing head."
There are a lot of different things to be said about the quote but I would like to focus on one dimension here.
Being interested in the subject, (both the war in Iraq and cell phones) it got me to thinking about the way in which the technology has been variously defined. It seems that the device has been a marker of various social groups who have various social purposes. There was the “yuppie” image of Michael Douglas in the film Wall Street. There were the teen users in Japan, Scandinavia, etc. and now one take on the meaning of a mobile phone user is that it marks a terrorist, or at least someone who is seen as a threat in this particular setting. The issue here is not whether a person using a cell phone is a terrorist or not, but rather that use of the device might be interpreted that way by another.
A link to the whole article is:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13124487/site/newsweek/
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