03 April 2011 | General
The Mobile Phone turns 38
On 3 April 1973, Martin Cooper made a phone call, the impact of which has been so huge it is hard to quantify.
It was not the content of the call but the call itself - he made it from a mobile phone whilst walking the streets of New York.
Mr Cooper called it the 'personal telephone' and wanted it to be "something that would represent an individual, so you could assign a number not to a place, not to a desk, not to a home, but to a person."
Little did he know that the phone would revolutionise our lives - both personal and professional and that later COST Action 207 would create wideband propagation models that would be adopted in the GSM standard or that COST Action 273 would develop mobile broadband multimedia networks.
The phone has certainly heralded in a swathe of benefits and increased efficiency and has had a manifest impact on relationships. However, whilst there are many positive uses for this technology, the negative impact, and specifically the new phenomenon of cyberbulling has also been a cause for concern.
COST Action IS0801 deals with cyberbullying and aims at sharing expertise on cyberbullying in educational settings, and coping with negative and enhancing positive uses of new technologies. Researchers, pupils, parents, teachers, unions, and local, regional and national authorities, are all in various ways starting to grapple with the issues involved in cyberbullying, in consultation with mobile phone companies and internet service providers. 28 COST countries as well as Australia and Ukraine are involved in the Action, which is due to end in October 2012.
