Can't live with them, can't live without them

Mobile phones are the bane of some people's lives, the vital accessory of others. Shane Hegarty charts 21 years of an era-defining gadget.

No style-minded person will be seen speaking into a mobile phone in a public place. Like eating in the street, it is simply too naff for words. The instruments themselves are getting a bit better looking, however. If you must have one, secrete a Mars Bar (£399) or KitKat (£499) from Sony somewhere about your person and commune with it in private.

... - The Irish Times, December 31st, 1993

Two teenage girls negotiate their way through the shoppers on Grafton Street in Dublin. They are together, but both are talking on their mobile phones. They weave through the shoppers, physically on a street in the capital but, digitally, their voices flung elsewhere, their minds somewhere between. Neither seems at all offended by the other's impoliteness. It seems to be the most natural thing to them; which, of course, it is. Next week it will be 21 years since the mobile phone arrived on the high street. They have not known the world without it.

Think back even 15 years. The mobile was a rarity, an unwieldy brick that was the preserve of top CEOs, of which Ireland still had few. Even 10 years ago, as The Irish Times was being so dismissive of the concept, they remained an exotic sight, still bulky and wielded only by those with strong egos and stronger wrists.

Five years ago, had you asked someone to text you, they probably wouldn't have known what you meant. Yet last New Year's Eve the Irish sent 17 million text messages, many in an economic form of English that would have been confusing in 1999 but is second nature now.

In hardly any time the mobile phone has changed the way we talk to each other and the way we communicate. It has rewritten the rules of social etiquette and introduced a new public nuisance. It has made privacy an ever rarer commodity. It has become the anabolic steroid of the pub quiz. It has brought with it health fears, but it has also rescued lives.

It has altered the face of the high street. The ubiquity of phone shops seemed to come overnight. As quickly, the humble payphone is being driven to extinction. There are 2,000 fewer on Irish streets than there were three years ago.

The Irish, it turns out, have taken to the mobile phone ravenously. We are the most active texters and spend more on mobile services than people in any other EU state. In Ireland 91 per cent of 15- to 24-year-olds have a mobile phone, having grown up with it as an essential accessory.

Not that you need this confirmed, but a British study has shown a marked generation gap. "New technologies require new languages," it said. "The arrival of the telephone required the learning of communication skills that do not use non-verbal cues. Without eye contact, establishing patterns of conversation is significantly more difficult. Young people have grown up with this new language and feel completely comfortable using telecommunications."

Adults see youths' constant use of text messaging, and mobile phones generally, as culturally and socially backward. Most users of www.50connect.co.uk, a website for the "mature", want to see mobiles banned from restaurants.

When the group of young people in one test went without their phones and home Internet access for two weeks, however, most showed withdrawal symptoms. The Priory clinic in London now treats "text addiction".

A recent study by the Italian consumers' association deprived 300 volunteers of their phones for two weeks. Nearly one in six reported loss of appetite or depression. A quarter said that being phoneless was such a blow to their confidence that it led to sexual problems.

Not everyone has been so smitten by the mobile. The US has always been more resistant to the charms of the "cell phone"; only recently has it reached the point at which more than half of homes have a mobile phone, a juncture Europe reached in 2000. In fact, in a recent MIT survey, 30 per cent of Americans said they believe it to be the worst invention ever.

It's an odd twist for the nation that invented the thing. The first mobile call was made by a Motorola research scientist, Dr Martin Cooper, in April 1973. As onlookers gaped at him on a New York street he called his rival head of research at Bell Labs. Walking and talking at the same time proved difficult. "I made numerous calls," said Dr Cooper, "including one where I crossed the street while talking to a New York radio reporter, probably one of the more dangerous things I have ever done in my life."

It was March 6th, 1983 when Motorola put the first portable phone on the market. Weighing 16 ounces, it looked like a military radio and cost $3,500.

The subsequent growth of the market has been staggering. In 1995 there were 91 million subscribers globally; last year there were 1.4 billion. There are now more mobile phones than fixed lines. After a brief dip in sales in 2002, last year saw 516 million units sold.

The ring-tone industry alone was worth €100 million in Britain last year. A mobile's chime has become a novel label; a personal statement of taste or a private joke made public, and also a way of individualising such a common item. It was quite amusing when people first adopted Fields Of Athenry or Amhrán na bhFiann. (That annoying Nokia ring tone, by the way, is taken from Francisco Tarrega's 19th-century guitar piece Gran Vals.)

The world, it seems, was waiting for the mobile phone. Hans Geser, a social theorist at the University of Zurich, argues that it fed an innate human need to communicate without being constrained either by uncomfortable physical proximity or by distance. "As it responds to such deeply ingrained and universal social needs, it is no surprise to see the mobile phone expanding worldwide at breathtaking speed," he has written.

"In fact, there are reasons to assume that it would have been equally welcome in all human societies and cultures in the past: that is, under all imaginable specific cultural or socio-economic conditions." In other words, if Nokia could export to the Cro-Magnon era, it would find eager consumers.

The success has begun to erode the truism that only half the world's population has made a phone call. Mobile sales are growing faster in the developing world than in the developed one. Where people used to have travel long distances to make a quick phone call, now they can do so through shared mobiles. There are long waiting lists for landlines in many African countries, so the mobile has been a great benefit, mainly to those in larger cities, where the coverage is better.

As it has shrunk the world, it has also shrunk the workplace. It means constant availability; calls at weekends and on days off. Among the next steps being developed is a phone that analyses your behaviour and guesses when you're busy, asking people to leave a message or call back.

That availability also has its benefits. We now hear of stricken mountaineers and hillwalkers being rescued after calling the emergency services or of sailors calling the lifeboat from a sinking vessel. But it has put a new strain on the rescue services, which find that people believe themselves to be safe simply because they carry a mobile phone when they wander into the wilds.

A recent European Union directive now requires communications networks to provide emergency services with whatever information they have about where a mobile phone call was made, so that those who are lost can be traced by the signal alone.

On its 21st birthday, then, it is increasingly hard to remember a world without it, but what can it look forward to as it grows into adulthood? A US company now offers television down the line - and the pornography industry, having conquered every other medium, is poised to exploit that potential too.

Manufacturers, having found that people were not interested in slow Internet access through their phones, are searching for more useful tools, looking to Scandinavian innovations suchas allowing people to order taxis and pay for parking via their mobiles. Our phones might soon be able to help us to find the nearest restaurant or cinema. Their screens might become bigger, even as the phones stay small, because the camera phone has rekindled the industry.

It might find itself prone to illness, however. The mobile phone has not been hit by viruses in the way computers have, but that might change.

In Japan in 2001 a virus spread that instructed phones to dial the emergency services, leading to chaos. We will probably soon find that the odd spam text is the least of our worries.

Most exciting of all, scientists in California are working on teleporting matter down a phone line. In a few decades, when the passenger squeezed next to you yells "I'm on the train!", you might be able to press a button that will send him somewhere else.