4 ms·
> domestic abuse is one of the main drivers of technology adoption in the first place. E.g. look at the studies of consumer adoption of beepers and cell phones.
by yodon 8y ago
> domestic abuse is one of the main drivers of technology adoption in the first place. E.g. look at the studies of consumer adoption of beepers and cell phones.
Citation?
As someone who lived though both pager and cell phone adoption curves, your assertion sounds highly suspect and doesn’t match any market research I’ve ever seen. The earliest mass adopters of pagers were physicians and surgeons (high income on call demographics) followed by drug dealers (ditto) and then teenagers as the price dropped. Cell phone early adopters were heavily biased towards high wage adults who were fearful of breaking down on the road at night and needing assistance (early cell phones would fit under the seat of a car with the handset near the dash or in the glove compartment but were too big to fit in a briefcase or purse). I’m pretty sure you’ve bought into some made up revisionist urban legend here.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Alex3917 8y ago> The earliest mass adopters of pagers were physicians and surgeons (high income on call demographics) followed by drug dealers That's why I specifically said consumer adoption. Doctors and drug dealers had good economic reasons for buying cell phones. But considering that the earliest cell phones were up to $10,000 inflation adjusted and weren't even remotely good, there were only a handful of non-business use cases for buying them for your family members. Mizuku Ito's book Personal, Portable, Pedestrian has a good overview of cell phone adoption and usage patterns. And there have been papers about cell phones being used for partner stalking for decades, e.g.: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=technology+partner+stalking https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=technology+partner+stal... Or for a more recent example, look at the uproar over Facebook instituting their Real Names policy because of how many people were using the site to stalk former intimate partners, among other issues.
- gamblor956 8y agoYou're just making stuff up again. The uproar over the Real Names policy had nothing to do with stalking former partners. It was about transgendered and queer individuals not wanting to be forced to use their legal/birth names rather than their transitional/post-transition names, and politically active individuals in oppressive countries not wanting to be publicly identified by their legal names on a publicly accessible website.
- Alex3917 8y agohttps://www.thedailybeast.com/how-facebook-exposes-domestic-violence-survivors https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-facebook-exposes-domestic-... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/15/facebook-change-controversial-real-name-policy https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/15/facebook-cha...
- gamblor956 8y agoThe Real Names Policy issue happened in 2014, more than a year before these articles.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- moftz 8y agoPeople could send hatemail and death threats in the mail before landlines existed. Sure, technology makes it easier to send anyone anything but progress has been made to make certain things more private. You can block someone on facebook or heavily lock your profile down to be invisible anyone but friends. You can block numbers easily on phones now. Encrypt your phone or computer (by default now!) to prevent people from installing tracking apps or spyware. You can use things like whatsapp to talk without the cell carrier recording phone numbers. GPS trackers are still an issue, I can't think of any way to get around that other than using a GPS jammer which is illegal and wouldn't block a tracker that uses cell towers as well. Cell phones and pagers used to be just as dumb as a landline, they receive everything and track everything but you can stay much more "off the grid" while still remaining in contact now.
- pc86 8y ago> That's why I specifically said consumer adoption. TIL doctors and drug dealers are not consumers.