If We Don't Actually Go Anywhere With Our Cellphones, What's The Point In Having Them?

A new study based on location tracking suggests that we, the ever-moving, ever-shaking society, don't actually stray very far.

Based on data collected from 100,000 cellular phones in Europe, people bop between work and home, home and work, and don't bust out of the norm all too often. And though the collected data carries significant weight in privacy concerns (all user-sensitive data was scrambled), researchers conceded that, if used for actual human tracking, it wouldn't be very difficult to find any of us.

The New York Times article investigating this research goes blah blah blah about science and disease control, etc., for a while, but what really struck me is that if we're only commuting between work and home, and if we're truly so habitual in our routines, why do we own cellphones at all?

Back in the day I had a landline even though all of my friends carried cellphones. I enjoyed the convenience and inherent anti-social nature of landlines—I wasn't, unlike everyone else, reachable at any given moment. It also forced commitment and decision-making out of my cohorts—nobody was going to ring me up fifteen minutes before we're set to meet and change locale; you pick the joint, you stick to it, end of discussion.

Many times I've considered going back to the heyday of landlines. I don't even know what they cost anymore. But I definitely see myself in those 100,000 phones, those 100,000 predictable routines. So what's the point?

[via: New York Times]