WE have a drawer we seldom open in a room we seldom enter.
Behind this rarely opened door to the Room Of Doom (long ago a tiny nursery, but now an oversized cupboard) resides the Drawer Of Chaos.
If you dared to investigate the contents of the Drawer Of Chaos, therein you would find, beneath a tangle of cables and chargers, the final resting place of several mobile phones.
Long forgotten, I now might reappraise the merits of these deceased gadgets, given the interest generated by the newly launched Mobile Phone Museum.
Founded by industry veterans Ben Wood and Matt Chatterley, it is home to a collection of more than 2100 mobile phones and details the history of the device.
The not-for-profit online museum includes models dating back as far as 1984, with high-resolution photos and backstories for many of the phones in its catalogue.
The museum began as a personal collection started by Wood more than 25 years ago and aims to preserve mobile technology heritage and help fund further growth.
Wood said: “No other invention in recent memory has shaped how we live more fundamentally than the mobile phone. From mobile payments to citizen journalism, always-on social media and the ability to work anywhere, it’s difficult to overstate the importance of the mobile phone.”
Devices are donated to the museum on almost a daily basis and each is catalogued, labelled, photographed and moved to a secure storage facility. Each donor is recognised on the website. There is also an educational dimension to the project – in future it hopes to visit schools and provide resources to students to help them learn about the technology around them.
Of course, these youngsters will probably wonder what all the fuss is about. Having grown up in a world in which a mobile phone is glued to the mitts of many, this technology is as commonplace to children today as the telly was to my generation.
I had the joyous challenge last year of teaching mobile journalism on Zoom to a class of first-year students who rarely left their bedrooms.
I soon realised that their grasp of the techniques and tech involved was sound and not a barrier to learning, despite our locked-down constraints. It was just that, through no fault of their own, they weren’t very mobile.
There were a fair few interviews with mums, dads and siblings.
Interestingly, the one thing young people seldom use their phones for is, er, making phone calls.
Their confidence in conducting video interviews on their mobiles often melts when you suggest they phone someone for a quote.
This has just given me a flashback to my own trainee journalism days with DC Thomson in Dundee.
On the desk next to every phone was a laminate instructing users on appropriate language to use when conversing on the telephone.
Little did I know then the extent to which the phone would revolutionise the industry I’d just entered.
Maybe the number’s up on the Drawer Of Chaos and it’s time to clear it out and make a donation.
History is calling.
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