If you’ve ever thought, “Man, I’d climb Mt. Everest if only I could call my mom when I reached the summit,” well, it’s time to pack your parka and put the Sherpas on speed dial (not to mention telling mom what you’re up to … literally).
The Nepalase telecom group Ncell has announced that it has successfully set up a cellphone base station at 17,000 feet, near the village of Gorakshep. Its signal will reach Everest base camp as well as the summit of the 29,029-foot mountain, enabling both voice and Internet connection.
“This is a great milestone for mobile communications, as the 3G high-speed Internet will bring faster, more affordable telecommunication services from the world’s tallest mountain,” said Lars Nyberg, chief executive of the Swedish phone company TeliaSonera, which owns 80% of Ncell.
Reading this story, I had two pretty divergent reactions.
The first was as simple as it gets: That’s cool. After all, if you had the wherewithal to actually scale the world’s tallest peak, it would be cool to share that moment with someone, right? I mean, I’ve called my parents or friends for far less significant things over the years. A couple years ago, I called my dad when I visited the launch site for Evel Knievel’s aborted 1974 Snake River Canyon jump. Geeky? You bet. But I wanted to share.
And that’s what mobile technology does, of course. It enables us to share moments that that would have been impossible just 15 or so years ago.
But here was my other reaction. Sometimes I wonder if our impulse to share everything via all our high-powered mobile electronic gizmos also interferes with our ability just to be present in life’s awe-inspiring moments. Instead of just taking it all in—whatever it might be—we feel this compulsive urge to photograph and upload and talk. In other words, technology seems to be encroaching on our capacity to experience life because we’ve become obsessively concerned with digitally bottling every experience and uploading it to Facebook and YouTube ASAP.
Now, as cultural “evils” go, this one is admittedly quite a ways down the list. There’s nothing inherently wrong with calling my dad or shooting a video or letting all my friends know about a cool experience via a social networking site.
I just wonder how we might experience life differently—and perhaps in a way that’s perhaps more integrated and fulfilling—if we left all our digital doodads at the figurative “base camp” every now and then.
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