Protection Cup for the Future?

The latest lecture with Sven Tollmien showed it once again – the future is in your mobile. Already today you can do plenty of other activities than just communication using your phone such as planning, playing games, listening to music, taking pictures etc. The geographical markets are increasing as well, people in developing countries have mobile phones in much larger extension today than ever, even though they might not use it for communication as much as we do because of the costs. The age groups using the cell phones on a daily basis are increasing as well. I remember that I got my first mobile phone by the age of 14, today I see children at age 7-9 playing with their phones as they were born with it! And of course I shouldn’t forget the companies who these days do a lot of research in the subject of how to use the mobile phones as a devise to steer and control their products or services.

During his lecture Sven showed the several things that you already can do or might be able to do with help of your mobile in the future. You can for example see information about people you meet in real life in you phone if you have aka-aki network, play virtual games in real life – for example running after a football only visible on the screen of your phone, or use your phone as a personal assistant who can for example suggest a restaurant in your taste, based on your previous choices and your current location.

Don’t get me wrong, these programs seem amazing, but I just can’t avoid asking myself one question. What happened to the old hackneyed discussion about the dangerous electromagnetic radiation? Does anyone think about it these days? Something that around the millennium was a common subject, today it seems to be very normal and accepted. The discussion about the danger of the electromagnetic radiation started first with a huge fuss about the danger of the micro, then everyone moved on to the cell phones, then the discussion emphasized the danger of using the hands free and latest to our laptops. But now no one thinks about it anymore; practically everyone has a micro in their home, parents buy cell phones for their children, I see plenty of men surfing on their laptops while holding them in their laps, or pregnant women using their hands frees in direct contact with their stomachs. No one seems to care about the dangerous radiation anymore?

But why? Honestly, I don’t know… I have tried to search for some forums where people have talked about this kind of things, but firstly all of the discussions regarding cell phones are dated a few years back and the other common denominator is that people do not exactly know whether they should fear this kind of radiation or not. Many of them mean also that there is so much radiation around us anyway so that a cell phone of your own doesn’t really make a difference. And for some reason the discussion has become old; like it seems to be with many of the health topics. Take for example the one that said that chips and grilled food could give you cancer, or the dangers with Atkins Nutritional Approach, or high cholesterol level in fat food, or the extreme danger of the UV light giving you skin cancer and so on.. They all start with people avoiding the dangerous products, but then everything goes back to normal. The same thing happened with the electromagnetic radiation. Not that the scientists have stated that the new wireless devises are not dangerous, but people just got tired of discussing the dangers and started to use their beloved devises and appreciating the benefits of them. And by introducing their children to it at the early age, they do not really break this wireless-devise-friendly pattern. Even the companies push people indirectly into this pattern by making the cell phones a part of their products.

Taking all this into consideration I guess the question in future will not be whether it’s dangerous or not to use a mobile phone, but rather how come we even considered the living without it? So maybe a protection cup wouldn't be such a bad idea at all in the future...