On the Tuesday of 3rd April 1973, Martin Cooper, then an engineer at the Motorola Inc, stood in midtown Manhattan and placed a call to the headquarters of Bell Labs in New Jersey. This was not just a normal call, for it was the world’s first handheld cellular phone call. Prior to that time, mobile telephony was limited to huge phones installed in cars and other vehicles. Using a prototype of what would later become the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x, the world’s first commercial cell phone, Mr. Cooper stood near a 900 MHz base station in New York City and placed a call to Dr. Joel S. Engel, his rival, at the headquarters of Bell Labs in New Jersey. The prototype handheld phone weighed 1.1 kilograms (2.4 lb) and measured 23 by 13 by 4.5 centimeters (9.1 by 5.1 by 1.8 in). It offered a talk time of just 30 minutes and took 10 hours to re-charge. However, Mr. Cooper was not concerned about the limited talk time as it would be difficult to hold something of that weight and size to an ear for more than 30 minutes. This day is marked as the break point in mobile phone technology, for it was from that time that other engineers across the world began exploring the possibilities of having hand held devices.
Keeping that in mind, fast forward to today, when we are talking about incredibly light and million times more powerful phones as compared to Mr. Cooper’s invention. Looking at the Samsung’s latest release, for instance, the almost flawless Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 weighing a mere 282 grams, measuring only 159.2 x 68.0 x 16.8 mm, armed with 12GB RAM and 12 Mega Pixels front camera, one might not really understand where we are coming from when it comes to mobile telecommunication technology. Between these two periods, a lot has happened. There has been numerous inventions and innovations all aimed at making human communication easier and efficient. It has been a revolution not only in the mobile telephony pioneering countries, but also in the whole world. Since the first mobile phone touched the Kenyan market – the bulky Motorola-MicroTAC-International-5200 with a conspicuously protruding external antenna – in the late 1990’s, the Kenyan mobile telecommunication industry has experience a drastic change till to date. By then, mobile phones were owned by a handful of the Kenyan tycoons. They were only used for making calls, and their memory could only store 99 phone numbers (as the case of the early 2000 Nokia 1011, commonly known as the “BRICK” in those days).
Today our electronics stores are filled with greatly capable smart phones that have more storage, faster speed and can be carried around effortlessly. They are well equipped with all imaginable technologies from internet connection capability to unbelievably sharp panoramic digital cameras. In terms of cell phones ownership rates, a research carried out by pew global (an American company that researches on the global attitudes and trends), 89% of Kenyans owned a mobile phone as of the year 2017, compared to 10% in the year 2002. This evolution of mobile technology and the upsurge of cell phone users in Kenya, has brought with it easy access of the devices to the young children, in particular high school students. There is nothing wrong with that; however, every technology demands a certain level of maturity from its user, and am sorry to say that a fraction of mobile phone users today lack that prerequisite. There has therefore been a decline in morality and social values, especially among the youth.
Well, it is not lost on me the exemplary things we have been able to achieve as a society using these devices. For how possibly could we communicate with each other? Through errand runners?, or writing letters that would take decades to reach the other end? Businesses have been created using cell phones, enhanced access to health care, improved transport sector, just to mention a few. But what troubles me most is the misuse of these devices which has become so intrinsic among many users. To makes things worse, the evolution of mobile phones has led to arrival of overly affordable devices in the market, which fortunately and unfortunately has enabled almost everyone, including our callow juveniles to acquire very easily. According to this group of users, the autonomy of the overly affordable mobile phone presents new possibilities for emancipation and change.
In some conservative societies like India, stories are common of village councils declaring (even though without any legal right to do so) that no one under the age of 20 should have a mobile phone. Mobile phones, according to this view, are especially dangerous in the hands of young people who can engage in clandestine courtships, which could lead to elopements or resistance to marriages arranged by family elders. Although I do not support this, there is a dire need of guidance to our young children on the proper use of cell phones, whether it shall come from the parents or from the society. The #IfikieWazazi sensation of last few months can be attributed to poor parenting and societal negligence, but I do not want to leave technology without any blame (in this case cell phones). Having readily available phones that are well capable of capturing every detail of our lives can push one to commit grievous mistakes, especially when their maturity level is under question. For how do you explain the instinctive and rampant posting and circulation of nude photos that reveal body parts that everyone agrees should be seen by only the selected and deserving few? This, among other acts of moral decadence perpetrated using the cell phones, is what forces me to wish that there was a clear legal requirement of who should hold a mobile phone, and what kind of phone, in Kenya. A smart phone for instance should only fall in the hands of a responsible mature adult.
You might accuse me of being archaic or retrogressive in thinking, but please before you vilify me, take a small piece of graph paper and a pencil. Plot a simple x-y 2 dimensional graph with the independent variable being mobile telephony invention and its subsequent innovations since the year 2000 on the x – axis, and the dependent variable being morals and ethics on the y –axis. Quantify the dependent variable with your choice of values and sketch the curve. Are we together? Watch as the societal morals and ethics dwindle with every improvement in technology! This inverse proportionality is what gives me sleepless nights, and to be honest, if things proceed as they are now, Kenya might be declared a morally bankrupt country by our next general elections. You may accuse me of making an outrageous generalization. Well, am fully aware that there are still good and upright people in our society who have not allowed themselves to be swayed by the waves of technology. However, if these men and women don’t take it upon themselves to preach the gospel of ethics, the degeneracy will continue, and sooner than later we might have only a handful of people who still have a functional moral compass. In data analysis, if a few data points behave differently from the majority of values in a random sample from a population, we call them outliers. These are mostly dropped from the dataset so that they don’t skew our analysis, or to put it in another way, outliers don’t determine the outcome. This is what justifies my generalization. So let us preach morality and ethical use of cell phones before it is too late.