I'm glad to read that Africa finally consolidated into one country.

Behold the power of Android!

Don't forget Nokia. The Asha phone does really well with a lot of these emerging markets.

ArcadianRefugee: I'll come back when that headline makes more sense.

Hey, it's already redefined the geography of Africa.

Now all it has to do is redefine the politics of Africa and job well done!

Cellphones are revolutionizing development in many countries--they reach out and touch everything we think, say and do.

It can bring banking services, cash-transfers, remittances from workers in other countries, and many other services to places without infrastructure of any sort. The phones can be used for many medical, scientific, political, and security purposes as well. If there's an app for it, it can be brought to the world's poor quickly and at low cost.

I remember seeing a wonderful picture of an African woman holding a fake cellphone. The thing which delighted me was that the fake was not a piece of plastic junk:  it was carved out of stone. This represents perfectly the strange, weird, wild and wonderful ways that technology affects culture and economies when it is introduced from outside.

You can be sure that if cellphones had been introduced into the stone age, people would have taken to them like flies to warm butter.

Another picture I love shows a Papua-New Guinean tribesman in his traditional costume (scanty) looked at a wall of televisions. Stone age, meet the Flintstones, a stone-age modern family.

There are many countries which have better internet connections and cellphone prices than us tech serfs in North America. A tabla rasa can be a major advantage when adopting new technology or building an economy. You don't have to junk the old stuff to replace it with new stuff. But it takes a certain amount of cultural and economic sophistication to do this quickly and successfully. There's more than one kind of capital involved. You need money, of course, but you also need intellectual, cultural, and socio-political capital. Former democracies and war-ruined advanced economies are a lot easier to rebuild than they are to create ex nihilo.

But seriously, there are a lot of street people with cellphones and laptops and I would not be the least bit surprised if quite a few of them are more sophisticated users of social media and other new tech than I am, simply because they were born into the arms of new tech, without the habits and inhibitions of the educated and the literate.

Interestingly, the scholars that I studied back in the 1970s and 1980s were already thinking in terms of hypertextuality to which much of the web has yet to catch up. The idea of massive interconnectedness some how got invented and explored to a surprising degree before any of the deep and forward thinkers got their hands on the most primitive models of cellphones and home computers. I suspect that there was some interplay between science fiction and science fact before any of these products were commercially possible, let alone available.

Mind you, the idea of the "web" as a "world mind" was invented by H.G. Wells. Yes, the same H.G. Wells who wrote The Time Machine and War of the Worlds. Such is the flexibility of the human mind that you can walk into a new civilization without going through any of the intermediate steps between your present world and the future.

An Ancient Greek citizen might be better adapted to our current politics, economics, and culture than your parents are. Or not. But you can be sure it wouldn't take them long to be yapping away with Aristotle over the web if they got the chance. Probably not THE Aristotle. Aristotle the olive seller.

I grew up in the country when party lines were still common. You listened when the phone rang for "your ring", which was a simple code of long and short rings, such as short-long-short or long-long or whatever.

Of course, everybody on the party line could pick up the phone and answer it or listen end as quietly as they could. Think about that. Saves a heck of a lot of time getting the gossip out. Every party line had at least one snoop.

You could generally hear the snoop come on the line, and you would almost certainly know who it was. So you could play all sort of head games with them. Forget Angry Birds, this was a lot more fun.

Also, if they knew you were out, your neighbors could answer the phone for you and take messages, or tell the caller where to find you, or just chat and catch up on the news before you get it yourself.

Think about how much money the phone companies were losing! The rural customers were getting all of this for free! Also, the companies were being forced to supply phone service in places where it wasn't economical because the government and others believed it was a public good that should be provided outside of cities.

Hey, boot-strapy red staters! How do like dem little green apples? You wouldn't even exist if you weren't subsidized up to your ears. You would not have the telephone, let alone radio, TV, roads, bridges, and a lot of other crap you can't pay for!

But I digress. Sort of. The truth is, that things never change quite so radically as you think they do. The old party lines could provide many of the "services" that you pay extra for today, for free. Need the weather? Call somebody and ask them what the weather is doing.

In the case of my parents, they could call a town one hour due weather-wards and get a one hour forecast because whatever it is doing over in Maine it will be doing where my parents live in one hour. Handy if you want to know whether you should bring the sheets in and put them in the drier.