The Buddy System on Steroids - jakequest http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/globalwire/one-phone-call-can-make-your-life-or-death-with-more-than-50-societies/ ====== jacquesm It's sad that this has become necessary, especially for a phone that you expect to be available all the time. Maybe it's time to start setting priorities. Here are a couple of resources on making your calls and responding to emergency situations in the field. They may give you some ideas as to how to remedy the current situation: [http://www.publichealth.net/doc/howtoworkout/HowToWorkOut.h...](http://www.publichealth.net/doc/howtoworkout/HowToWorkOut.htm) ~~~ jrockway Yeah, I think for many people the solution is to have two phone numbers. A burner number for emergencies and one for all other communication. I know some people in this country that only use their cell phone to make calls when they have no other choice -- and that's great for them. I don't think this sort of phone should be available to every citizen. ~~~ evgen The solution, however, is not more things we need to worry about managing, but more things we need to worry about fixing in other areas: * Lack of police accountability. * Lax (if any) regulations on police actions. * Lax (if any) regulations on police resources and the ability to deploy them. ~~~ jfarmer I would suggest the same regarding the judicial system. ------ danbmil99 Great. And now everyone on the street will be armed with a phone. ~~~ eli "Everyone"? Not so fast. Many of the tribes in the study are traditionally pacifist. ~~~ nooneelse Well, I suppose they may not have been pacifists in the day they all had their "one phone call" moment and picked up a gun. :-) ------ danbmil99 The problem is the flip side: an over-reliance on remote communication. We will have to take a serious look at privacy, and the amount of intrusion and loss of privacy caused by digital networks, both phone and online. ~~~ jakewalker If your argument is that we have to think about what we're giving up by having our entire lives saved by internet-connected devices, well, that's a good argument, and it's one that we'll be living with for a very, very long time. ~~~ c1sc0 Is it really 'our entire lives'? I mean if you want to make the point that we can't risk saving what we can't afford to lose, I can think of a lot of things I'd sooner lose than my privacy. I'd even sacrifice my privacy if that meant saving a life, so it's all about the value I put on these things. ~~~ jrockway I don't think this argument works. It is not a matter of losing the privacy versus saving someone's life. If we're all online 24x7, we all give up a little privacy every day to be online 24x7, _regardless of whether it is for saving someone's life_. If your child is drowning, you are not going to think about giving away your privacy in exchange for saving them, you are going to jump in and save their life. If your only alternative to saving someone's life is to not be online, then you obviously would not be online. I personally wouldn't be on my phone at all if I was in that situation, but whatever. I think the idea of one call to save a life is quite interesting, though. Doesn't seem to make sense to give up your privacy for just any situation. If there is a life at stake, then OK, I would take a little risk in exchange for saving that life. If there is no risk, I would probably not be online at all, so I wouldn't do anything online that could possibly be considered risky. (Including buying a phone that I know can't possibly be used for any purpose other than making a phone call.) ~~~ pbhjpbhj > _If your child is drowning_ That's not the sort of situation that the parent is being envisaged here. The parent is envisaged having enough of an emergency that someone can call out that "all your lives could depend on me doing something". But, what if you have no phone network access? ------ chwahoo Is there any way to reduce the "one call can save your life" issue by introducing a time lag of 10 minutes? (I would assume that most people are not in a life-and-death situation for 10 minutes after they made the one call.) This would give people time to change their behaviour and get to a safe location (assuming they haven't been caught, of course). ~~~ jrockway Why? Your phone will still ring in the other person's pocket, and they will still think you are dead and call the local newspaper. The news would have a lot of time to publicize the fact that you owe the city a $50 phone bill. ------ jakewalker I'd like to see a follow-up article, a year or two later, that compares this with an identical study with the same methodology - but which examines the phone usage habits of the same community (or close to it) both before and after the cell phone was introduced. I think it's fair to say that the introduction of the cell phone will be associated with changes in these communities' lives. Whether it's positive or negative will depend on their individual circumstances and backgrounds. ------ noonespecial _"For a tribe in the Philippines, one-half of those who witnessed a murder by strangers were killed themselves"_ This is an excellent quote for HN. ------ lsc eh, I have a cellphone. If I'm in a bad neighborhood, I don't call unless I'm wearing a helmet and carrying a gun. I live in a high crime area, you see. ~~~ jrockway How many people live in your area? ~~~ lsc >How many people live in your area? I have no idea, most of my neighbors live there too, I'd be surprised if there was more than 200 people living there in all. As far as my experience goes, this is a pretty typical part of town; it's one of the nicer parts of town, but you could walk around here with a few hundred dollars worth of small electronics (say, a laptop and a small laptop bag) and be fine. It's one of those areas that sorta grows up around a nice school, and when the city built that new library, some of the nicer apartments just went up. The rest of the apartments that were there when I moved here? Cheaper. Cheaper, and falling apart. I think about half the buildings in the area are condos and rentals; the other half