Reflection Paper

Jeffrey Cranstoun

E1203XXXX

TEC 5173-501

Spring 2022

Word Count: 413

Week 1 Reflection – The Tipping Point

Thinking back on this week’s topic, the “Tipping Point,” I can remember the point in time when cell phones really reached their “tipping point.” Growing up in the 1980s, my father was the only one I knew that owned a cell phone, and it was attached to his car. The phone itself was bolted to the floor of the car in the front, and in the trunk of the car was a large box containing the electronics needed to make it work. By the middle of the 1990s, cell phones were growing in popularity and now able to be carried around, but they were still extremely expensive, not only for the phone itself, but also because each time you spoke on the phone you were charged a rate of $0.50 per minute. As my siblings and I grew up to be teenagers towards the later part of the 1990s, the cost of owning a cell phone was still so expensive that my family only owned one and whomever had plans that took them farthest from home was the child that took the phone with them so they could call my parents on their home landline phone in case of emergency.

As an adult, I purchased my first cell phone in 2003, but had the phone shut off after the contract expired because they were still so expensive. It was not until 2007 that I again owned a cell phone, and it was at this point that I purchased my first smartphone, a Palm Treo 700wx, which ran Windows Mobile 5. According to a graph I found, this indicates that the 2007 purchase of my smartphone coincided with the early adoption phase, a time in which a drastic increase in worldwide adoption of cell phones occurred (Casais, 2018). I distinctly remember that many of my friends and family also bought cell phones of their own around this time and that texting became a popular activity. It was also about this time that I realized that I could save money and offset the expense of my cell phone and calling plan by canceling my landline at home, since it was just much easier to call me on a device I always was carrying with me. Looking back, I feel that this time period around 2007 was a tipping point for cell phones, as I felt a lot of pressure to buy one from my friends so that we could communicate with one another more freely.

References

Casais. E. (2018, December 19). Mobile phone market forecast - 2017. Retrieved December 28, 2021,

from https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_mobilex2017.htm