Consumer control and an awful lot of discarded cell phones

This has already gotten considerable bounce online, but just in case you missed it, it’s worth reading “The Afterlife of Cellphones,” by Jon Mooallem, from this past weekend’s NYT Magazine. (Particularly if you have an interest in “unconsumption,” a recurring Murketing theme.)

The piece concentrates on cellphones, but as a single example of widespread problems with e-waste that apply to most any sort of gadget you can think of. To me the most interesting section was the final one, which includes the argument that “most phones are retired because of psychological, not technological, obsolescence.”

This is no real surprise, of course, but it’s interesting to read someone saying “People want [a cell phone] to be an expression of their personalities” in this context. In the business/marketing/design press, statements nearly identical to this are made all the time, regarding a wide variety of products. But in those settings, the remark is invariably positioned as a) something that must be understood if you want to run a profitable consumer business, and/or b) an adjunct to the argument that the “consumer is in control” and this newly empowered creature demands not just functionality but individuality-expression and stylistic excellence and so on from most every object s/he owns.

So perhaps the consumer really is “in control” … and is making a mess of things?

Also interesting: “82 percent of those with Internet-enabled phones do not go online.” This plays to another theme that’s interested me for a while now: Paying a premium for features that are never used.

And finally: “The United States Geological Survey estimates that in 2005 there were already more than half a billion old phones sitting in American drawers.”