In the word mobile, mobile was, for so long, an adjective.
At first the word did not go far: it lived in the mouth that had just said it and the distance made it imprecise, changed it.
The word became really mobile 5,000 years ago, when it occurred to someone that marks in the clay could imitate its sounds, repeat it.
It was state-of-the-art technology, and it changed everything.
The writing made it possible to fix those words in the mud and carry them from here to there;
since then they never stopped moving.
Letters, books, telegrams, diaries, mails or messages are ways of the mobile word.
Until, in the word mobile, mobile stopped being an adjective; A few years ago it became a noun — especially in Spain. Unlike other Castilians - who say cell phone, cell phone, phone - the one here says cell phone to name an artifact that was bigger before and now small, one that used to be on the table and now in the pocket, which used to allow people to talk And now it allows, above all, to see the world —or that part of the world that they tell us to see: draw a world for ourselves. The word has been mobile for millennia, but now the mobile has become the sign of the times: almost everything is in it, it is in almost everything.
The mobile is the machine that defines these decades. 30 years ago, the first were like bricks and did not do anything that the fixed ones did not do, except to walk; 20 years ago, the newest ones got smaller and began to connect to the Internet and, thus, the waterfall. Now some 5,000 million people have a mobile; 1 billion is not smart, 4 billion is - mobiles, I mean, of course. One out of every two people in the world has one or more; one in two, none: later we talk about inequalities.
In rich countries it is unavoidable. The mobile is, now, the thing with which everyone spends the most time. Hours and hours every day, and that feeling that without your mobile you are nobody: not seeing it for a few minutes is anxiety. People do nothing without that piece of metal and glass, they look for it, they attend to it non-stop, at work, at home, in the bathroom, in bed; any transportation is another excuse to get caught up in it. A few years ago everyone checked, when leaving, that they had money, documents, keys, a handkerchief. The money and documents are already on the mobile, the keys are arriving, the handkerchief is a bit complicated; the indispensable thing is that machine. I cannot think of another object in history with which we have had such an intimate relationship.
The mobile phone has really changed the way we live, the ways we live together, the surveillance we suffer: mobile phones know more about us than we do, and they hand it over to their masters. It is one of those oddities that becomes normality, novelties that we forget are new: we no longer know what it was like to ask how to get to such a place, to find out about the news at night, to flirt at random, not to record every moment, to play games. do not play, think for a while, think even before speaking, lose a couple of hours.
We no longer know: we have been invaded, we enjoy it.
The telephone, as its name implies, was a device that carried sounds far away.
The mobile, like its name, is a device that is carried far to never be far away: an object that has become your place.
You are not in such a corner, in such a train, in such a room: you are on your mobile, moving.
Thus, the word mobile is once again an adjective: it makes us all mobile, mobile subjects, mobile objects, it redeems us from the obligation to be somewhere to do so many things that previously forced us to be somewhere, it prevents us from not being in none: fight against space, against bodies, against geography.
We still don't know if that is good or bad or the opposite;
we are learning, yes, everything is mobile.
That everything always changes and little changes.