Uneasy Rhetoric

Verizon has a new phone, the Migo. The phone has only four programmable buttons and an emergency button. It is targeted at parents who want to keep in touch with their children but don’t want to give them the responsibility of a real cell phone.

It’s probably a good idea – certainly a better one than those kiddie leashes that, thankfully, seem to have gone out of style – but something about it seems a little wrong, somehow. Maybe its because I imagine a parent walking through the house calling the kid on the Migo every few seconds to ask “Where are you now?”

This reminds me of something Dan Burden mentioned in his talk on creating walkable communities back in October. Burden said “children need range to roam.” Children today have one-ninth (11 percent) the range of their parents. Burden suggested we need “free range children.” Will devices like the Migo comfort parents enough to let their children range more freely?

Somehow I think the Migo doesn’t do much to let that happen. To my thinking, by stripping down the cell phone to create the Migo, Verizon has also exposed what the cell phone truly is, what “being connected” really means. The Migo is just another kind of leash.