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As recently as two years ago, it was the common (if unpopular) wisdom among futurists that cellphones with a visual component would never catch on, because the telephone was about maintaining distance rather than eliminating it. By way of illustration, everyone pointed to the unexpected success of the text message. Futurists as famous and established as Matthias Horx of the Zukunftsinstitut were calling it one of the best examples of a "future flop".

Today ... well.

My only experience with a cellphone, and with a pager before that, was as a leash to a workplace. Thus I never learned personally to think of a cellphone as a thing which bound together social circles outside the demands of the workplace; and yet at the same time I could see exactly that happening: but not for me, and not for those I worked with. This was a thing evolving in the youngest echelons of the universities and then in the high schools, not in the generations which thought they controlled the trends. The major drives in those age groups are simultaneously for independence and at the same time to establish a peer group independent of the adults. Like the Internet, the cellphone allows both. More: the cellphone cannot be easily monitored by parents or other authority figures - and the text message can be monitored least of all.

So why should the success of the text message and now the camera phone come as any surprise? Have you never passed notes in class? Have you never dreamed of your first car?

The trends which shape societies are not driven by the monied generations but by those below them, trying to assert their own independence and their own identity. For society-driving technologies, teens and the youngest adults cannot be dismissed as a limited niche market. If we are capable of self-honesty free of nostalgia we ought to know and understand the root of their desires, because once we were them. It remains only for the price of the new technology to drop sufficiently that it can become accessible within a teenage allowance.

Even so, a few trends are driven by the workplace, though far fewer than we might think - and surprisingly few by the demands of efficiency or profit. Remember the paperless promise of the computer?

For the most part, Horx has a better sense of trends than most because he has a keen understanding of his own generation and environment, and also because he is less invested in the twin blinkers of ideology and marketing than most. For example, he has named the intelligent

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