content analysis

Americans live in a state of abject cell phone poverty.  Of course, there are much worse kinds of poverty: economic, moral, spiritual.   However, I think that this state of affairs speaks volumes about the kind of society we live and the risks it faces in the future.

As I noted in “cell phone meets world, pt. 1″ yesterday, the developing world is embracing the cell phone and quickly adopting and developing a wide variety of new ways to use them.  In nearly all parts of the post-industrial world other than the U.S. (most particularly Europe and Japan), the mobile phone is (and has been for years) essentially a mini-computer.  It is capable of advanced word-processing, playing video and images, surfing the internet, and nearly everything else a real computer does.  Text messaging is normal part of everyday professional and personal life.  They can be linked to one’s bank account and swiped at stores (like a debit card).  They have built-in camera as good as some single function cameras.  They travel between countries with no problem.  And the look cool, really cool.  Whereas Americans use mobile phones essentially as phone with a few bonuses, people in other countries carry around multi-purpose, tiny computers.  Probably most irritating to your average American locked into a 75 year Verizon contract costing $100 a month, is that cell phones aren’t costing anybody else nearly as much.

There are many reasons for this disparity.  First, American cell phone companies use antiquated network technology and lock consumers into using one phone on one service (for more on the technical issues, read here).  Second, though the U.S. cell phone market is highly competitive, the fact that companies lock consumers into monthly plans and multi-year contracts essentially gives one company a monopoly over the individual.  By contrast, in Europe, consumers pay the actual cost of a phone, buy pay-as-you-go cards at fairly affordable rates, and can switch between companies at anytime.  This results in far more competitive pay-as-you-go rates.  (Additionally, Europeans don’t pay for incoming calls, unlike us stateside dopes).

Because the cell service companies have such a stranglehold on marketplace and even the models of the phones, they have kept many new technologies from coming out on the U.S. market.  Cell phone makers like Nokia, LG, Samsung, and others are currently producing a wide variety of cool phone technologies that Americans don’t have because Verizon, At&T, and Cingular require very specific specs for their network-specific models of each phone.

This free market disaster — in which Americans don’t have access to the best available technologies because of the capacity of companies to control the availability in an unregulated fashion — is typical of the kind of society we have today.  Because of the unwillingness of political elites to intervene, regulate, and encourage good behavior among corporations, we see American slipping behind the rest of the developed world.  The same is true of environmental technologies like wind power.  Unlike so many European nations, the U.S. government has done very, very little to encourage the development of such technologies or to help companies make environmental options (like residential solar products) consumer-friendly.

Our free market dogmatism — a resistance to regulating in pro-consumer ways — has undoubtedly left us in the dust of Europe and Japan in the realm of cell phone technology.  The same pigheadedness could have far more serious repercussions in other domains.

content analysis is still a work in progress and one unexpected reality of blogging is that it’s sometimes hard to think of some thing worthwhile to say.  In order to provide the loyal reader(s) of ca with something to read on a daily basis, I have decided to implement the following changes:

• the sunday reads closes up shop: I think we can all agree that this planned series that only happened once was a well-intentioned failure.  Truth be told, it takes away from my beloved Sunday if I have to post a whole collection of the articles that I’m reading.  In place of the sunday reads, I will post a carefully chosen article every day in a section called slow news.  For a full explanation, see the coming debut.
• america for europeans: This may well be a harebrained idea, but I came up with this watching last week’s great Frontline special on healthcare around the world.  The basic idea is to briefly discuss things that are, for better or for worse, uniquely American and slowly document what it is to live in  America in the early 21st century.  I’m pretty sure that’s kind of the idea of This American Life, but I’m stealing it.
• marx’s diary: In the February issue of Dave Eggers’ The Believer, Sam Stark had a disorganized, but interesting article about a 96 page violet notebook written by the young Karl Marx.  Marx’s notebook included poems, the first act of a Hamlet-like play, a novel about constipation, and, apparently, a lot of nonsense.  In the marx’s diary section, I will highlight some aspect of sociologists’ lives other than our work.  It could be something creative by a sociologist or something silly.  This column could be really fun or really short-lived.  Keep an eye on it.

Also, this week: look out for a tirade on the life and supposed death of newspapers in response to Eric Alterman’s fantastically dumb article in The New Yorker a few weeks back.  For more on Alterman, see here (on him becoming the “Aging-Lefty Lindsay Lohan”), here (on him just being wrong a lot), and here (on him being self-aggrandizing and picking stupid fights).