Conceived by Araucária Agência Digital and the Hacktudo Festival, the Hi Tech Celular 50 exhibition tells the story of the 50 years of the invention of the cell phone starting on the 23rd, at the Museum of Tomorrow, in the port region of Rio de Janeiro. The device was created on April 3, 1973 by American engineer Martin Cooper. The show will take the form of an exhibition circuit, with audiovisual resources, alphanumeric totems, panels and games with data and curiosities. The narrative takes the audience through six sections: Black Hole, Mobility and Freedom, Popularization and Individualization, Multiplicity, Excess and Labyrinth of Possibilities. The exhibition will not only address the history of the cell phone. “There is a historical path but, in the end, it questions what are the possibilities of cell phone impact on health, education, culture, democracy”, said the curator of the exhibition, Miguel Colker. There will also be discussions about the future of the device. The initial idea is to take the viewer inside the cell phone which, since its invention, has been converging and absorbing almost all technologies: photo camera, video camera, typewriter, compass, map, calculator, “and our attention too”, completed Colker. Generations Going back to the past reveals that until the first generation of cell phones, people only spoke during a call. According to the curator, the great advent of the first generation was the cutting of the wire that attached the telephone to a table, to the wall, to an office, to a house. At the same time, that first generation was very rudimentary and primitive. Cell phones were all black or white, heavy and huge. The first generation of cell phones gave freedom to communicate, but did not have roaming (a service that allows you to receive and make calls or use mobile data in regions outside the coverage of the contracted operator), recalled the curator. Roaming only appeared in the second generation of cell phones, which is called popularization and individualization. In the second generation, cell phones are an effective and necessary device. “It develops because of the human need around it. It becomes popular. It is in this second generation that we start to get used to the presence of cell phones, unlike the first generation, which was not accessible to everyone, but symbolized an elite ‘status’”. Already in the second generation, it reaches the middle class, becomes popular and the industry itself helps in this, with the break of the state monopoly and the emergence of commercial operators. “The cell phone ceases to be exclusive to the elite and becomes individualized, for adults, for the executive adult, for the child, for the “pretty girl”, for the rocker. There is now a process of individualization of this device”. There is, at this stage, an important technological development. The cell phone ceases to be analogue and becomes digital. When this occurs, it facilitates the emergence of SMS. “We no longer have a device just to call each other and have one to send text messages. The cell phone provides several things, such as abbreviations, the communication of emoticons (characters that express emotions). This starts to enter popular culture through torpedoes. The second generation also becomes a device for people to entertain themselves, to have fun, through games (games)”. The third generation of cell phones marks the advent of the smartphone, “which is a revolution,” said Colker. The third generation actually creates the mobile Internet, uniting the Internet and the telephone with computing. The curator said that the odd generations are revolutionary, while the even ones intensify the process of the previous revolution. In Colker’s view, the transition from the fourth to the fifth generation is very similar to what was experienced in the third generation. There was a technological intensification in the fourth generation. And what is expected is that the fifth will be a new revolution. Miguel Colker estimated, however, that the effects of the 5G revolution will only appear in the sixth generation, ten or 15 years from now, just as the effects of the creation of the smartphone can be felt more strongly today. Necessity Colker analyzed that the cell phone is already the device with the greatest digital inclusion in the world, but it should become almost necessary in the near future. The democratization of cell phones, reaching economic classes C and D, occurred in the transition from the third to the fourth generation of the device. The number continues to grow, but Colker stated that in the short term, however, there will be no universalization because the world is still very unequal. He estimated that the cell phone will reach 90% of the population and, then, it will become a crucial device for society issues such as health, education, culture, diversity, sustainability. In the medium and long term, it is believed that there will be a new change in relation to cell phones. The wire, which had been abandoned in the first generation, seems to have returned in a perverse way in the fourth generation, because today, according to the Ericsson Mobility Report, 91% of people cannot stay more than one meter away from their smartphones. “That is, there is a wire that connects us to our smartphones. What is expected is that in the next generations, we will free ourselves from this black monolith and move on to another stage. The screens will multiply. I can have a chip in my body and that chip can connect to any screen that is in front of me, inside the bus, Uber, my house, the computer. Or maybe I don’t even need a screen because there will be a dizzying increase in voice assistants, with the advancement of 5G, 6G and so on”, signaled the curator. Future For the coordinator of the Technology and Society Center (CTS) of the Getulio Vargas Law Foundation (FGV Direito Rio), Luca Belli, the cell phone was an evolution in terms of technology that supports other technologies. In the beginning, it was equivalent to a brick, with more than one kilogram, which only supported audio calls. Then came SMS, originally created as an emergency system that later went viral as a useful service, and was even one of the main business models from the 1990s to 2000s. computer, the iPhone, and then the smartphone evolved as a platform, integrating all the other services and inventions that are being conceived. Luca Belli indicated the existence of two paths to the cell phone. On the one hand, the smartphone can evolve, integrating more artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, more services such as holographic communications, with the evolution of computing, but also with the migration of the smartphone’s computational capacity to large cloud servers and, even improvement of communication networks. “I think it has a great future, not as a basic cell phone, but as an enhancement of today’s smartphone, with more services, incorporating artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality functionalities”. Another path involves the functionality of the smartphone being incorporated into other types of device, such as smartwatches (smart watches or computerized wristwatches). This depends a lot on technological evolution, on the one hand, and also legislation, for the protection of privacy and personal data, as in the case of cameras connected to glasses. “We can foresee this bifurcation. On the one hand, the cell phone as support for new services, with a huge presence of artificial intelligence, and as voice support, which is already happening, but will be improved, with a much higher level of sophistication in the coming years”. On the other hand, he admitted that it is also possible that everything that exists on the cell phone is incorporated into other types of more practical and lighter devices, such as watches, glasses, with the possibility, also, of a hybrid function – that the cell phone continues to be computational support for other smaller devices, which are connected not only to the internet, but between them, with greater support.
Agência Brasil
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