Cell phone addiction needs to end
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COMMENT, Global – Often that is just too much information. Cell phone users in public often have little discretion.
Cell phones on trains.
Cell phones (or mobiles if you prefer) in restaurants.
Famously, I once heard a man chatting up a woman in a toilet cubicle with the door closed at a cinema. I first thought she was in there with him, then he came out holding a phone.
I wonder what she thought of the loud ‘flush’?
The Market Opportunity for Quiet
Expect a pendulum swing back to quiet and focus.
In the meantime expect a rise in products offering peace & quiet, tranquility and rest.
Expect added devices that give control over a person’s micro-environment ie. The space around them.
Expect ideas like quiet zones and others.
I noticed even the more peaceful European capitals now had noisy cell phone users. Recent surveys have shown Germans too are seeking peace & quiet.
A conversation with French people in Paris in August, turned to the stresses of modern life.
Peace & quiet will be a big opportunity. The value lies in identifying how solutions to that opportunity should be implemented in global and local markets.
The extrapolation into outcomes like new global manners and etiquette, also highlights important social trends.
Open plan offices are a practical example of a countervailing force against peace & quiet, depending on how they are implemented. They will be effected.
But mobiles and cell phones have been the ‘poster-child’ for the broader movement of individualism (look at me I am important), which is also part of numerous nascent countervailing trends.
A further analysis by 2thinknow would unearth numerous market and product opportunities in line with this nascent current to 8 year trend in various global markets.
Don’t mind the noise of a dozen others in a din?
So why is peace & quiet important to innovation?
Peace & Quiet needed for Inspiration
If you want to concentrate you need peace & quiet.
As I write this I am in a library. Been researching. The librarians are gossiping loudly. Nowhere is quiet these days.
Why can’t we get peace?
We underrate the need to concentrate. We need peace.
On trams and trains now public transport users loudly discuss their social lives.
Of course this is worse in some countries.
In my global experience, Australians from Sydney & Melbourne are the loudest, most rude mobile phone talkers in the world.
Cell Phone Abusers on Trains - no innovation here
Before I used to enjoy a quiet trip to read a book or magazine.
Now it is nigh-impossible as men, but more often women, recant their social lives loudly into a device.
Twenty years ago it would have been a sign of madness. Now judging by some of the conversations I overhear, it probably still is!
If you want any proof that mental illness is a new epidemic (as many politicians in Australia privately believe), listen to the mildly psychotic rantings of a few vocal public transport users who share too much.
Quite often I think people do it to show off their social lives, as if to say I am so very busy and therefore very attractive to others / very important.
Oh well, in
The new low point in Peace & Quiet
I often head on a plane, and write voluminous amounts of material.
Both on the plane and at the airport before.
The quiet and change of scenery allows me to shift focus & gain new insight.
Now according to numerous articles, but specifically Conde Nast Traveller magazine, in plane cell phone calls may be a reality.
The Europeans are testing the device.
Sure it is up to individual callers, but one of the great defenses of air travel has always been, ‘I can’t talk as I am Boarding the plane’ and the resultant time difference.
On long haul flights this can buy you an almost uninterrupted day.
Now if there’s no excuse for false urgency you can expect that professionals will need to become available during the previously relaxing flying time.
The last quite place is about to be taken away.
Oh well, I guess there is a market opportunity.
But I’d prefer peace & quiet now.
Take care
Christopher
Speaker. Author. Editor-In-Chief. Executive Director of Innovation, 2thinknow.
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