It's Alive!

How our mobiles became Frankenstein's monster - Andrew Keen (CNN)

Hardware companies will articulate the benefits of their technology in terms of "personal empowerment." But the real truth behind these increasingly intelligent devices is personal disempowerment. Such is the eerie reality of a phone that you can't live without.

Some of the problems with our cellphones are already well known. Last November, for example, the American epidemiologist and writer Dr Devra Davis told me about her research claiming that our cellphones could be giving us cancer.

Then there was Robert Vamosi, the security expert, who explained to me how our mobile gadgets were spying on us. Vamosi even authored a book last year about this, entitled "How Our Technologies Betray Us: The Dark Side of Our Infatuation With New Technologies."

So what to do? How can we stop our phones becoming Frankenstein-like extensions of ourselves?