Observations on mobile phones

At the memorial service for the journalist Anthony Sampson at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London this month, Sir Tony O'Reilly, giving a tribute, said he had asked a friend what he should do if his mobile phone rang while he was in the pulpit. "Answer it," said the friend. "It might be Anthony."

We all laughed. But there is something surreal about these pocket gadgets that allow us to speak to the unseen without needing to know where they are. As the sober Economist has noted, the mobile phone has a supernatural dimension that other high-tech devices lack.

I am a non-believer in the paranormal (the afterlife included) yet, after pressing the button to reach our son in New York and finding him in Martha's Vineyard, I mused aloud to my husband: "I wonder if I could call my mother." My mother died decades ago. But if distance is irrelevant to communication, why should time be a barrier?

The scientific answer, I am informed, is that voices cannot be recovered from the past because there is no place for them to have been stored. This was not so clear in the 19th century, when scientists believed in the ether, an elastic substance thought to permeate all space and through which light waves were propagated. Telepathy - electrical thought-transference - seemed plausible. Distinguished physicists - notably, Sir Oliver Lodge FRS, a prominent interpreter of James Clerk Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism - were members of the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882 for the investigation of the borderland between the physical and the psychical. The society (which still exists) emphasised the collection of empirical data and verifiable results.

Sigmund Freud, trained as a neurologist, was a member and believed in telepathy to the end of his days (in London, in 1939). Alexander Graham Bell is said to have thought of his invention, the telephone, as a way not only of relieving deafness but of communicating with the dead. He agreed with his brother that whichever of them died first would try to contact the other.

This spiritual aura is something to keep in mind as, on bus or train, you try to shut out the personal confidences being shouted out all around you into a four-inch piece of metal. Yet there is nothing surreal about the benefit that the mobile telephone is bringing to the developing world. Cheaper and easier to use than computers, the mobile is reaching corners where land-line telephony has not. Farmers and fishermen can find the best prices for their product. Workers hunt for jobs. Mothers can track their children. Wasted journeys are saved. The appeal is universal and irresistible, and literacy is not a requirement. Will the world's have-nots be able to resist the supernatural appeal of the mobiles they are so rapidly acquiring? Reports of a Finnish service - which has now shut down - selling text messages from Jesus suggest not.

So, too, does news that Filipinos have a penchant for confessing and receiving absolution by text and that the Chinese are burning effigies of mobile phones so that the dead can call each other.

No matter. The superstitious overlay will be outweighed by the sheer convenience, the labour-saving, position-locating practical magic of the greatest gadget since the wheel.

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