Even cheaper - £2.95.
I know hardly anyone who wears a watch. Those that do are mostly men. Not that England is third world, obviously, but if it’s true here then it’s probably more likely to happen in countries where it’s difficult to find the money for both a watch and a phone.
^
not necessarily true. the philippines is a poor country. but the registered number of sim cards (last time i checked) was 50 million, as against a population of 90 million. you have multiple sim card owners of course but the point is made. and the cheapest second-hand chinese-made phone is more expensive than a digital watch (they give those out free during parties and conventions.)
In Cameroon a cheap-but-sturdy cellphone costs around $10.00. Credit could get expensive- I’d pay ten bucks a month or so for pretty limited use, but receiving calls was always free and most people had worked out a complicated code of “missed calls” to communicate without charge.
You could buy the famous Osama Bin Laden/Beverly Hills 90210 flip top watches for about a dollar. Anything an adult would want to wear (not the cheapest plastic crap from China) would cost more. People cared about how they looked, and would avoid cheap crap if they could. We don’t get these watches here because, as mentioned, they are absolute junk and don’t last long.
Adult men with some means of making money would usually have a cell phone, but women, older people, etc. often did not. Few people got the rock-bottom phone- fancy color displays and the like were common.
I don’t think watches were very common. A lot of everyday timekeeping was done relative to the call to prayer, and people were pretty good at keeping track of time via the sun. Anyway, very few things were all that urgent and punctuality was not considered a big deal- meetings started whenever people happened to wander in. Every year when the days got shorter and the sun rose later, however, my students would show up proportionally later and later to their first classes.
does “does not last long” mean that its band gets broken? Or does the cheap digital watch just turn off?
Given that, it makes me wonder how much absolute demand there’d be among common citizens in third-world countries for accurate watches. There may not be much perceived need for knowing the exact time.
but a watch won’t tell american kids that korea is not one of saturn’s moons.
There are several charity org.s here in Germany that collect old cell phones* that are still working and distribute them in 3-world-countries. This is an interesting development because the hurdle of establishing a normal landline phone infrastructure was not solved, instead skipped by new technology.
The hurdle was that to lay a phone line out into the country costs a lot of money for the phone company, but while it would be vitally important for the villagers, few would be able to afford a landline. So high operating costs + little return = not worthwhile for private companies. (In contrast, when at the start of the century phone companies started in Europe - and several companies went bust, also - it was assumed that everybody wanted a phone and would be able to afford it). It’s not only that laying the line is expensive, in many 3 rd world countries, people steal lines to sell for the metal, or the line needs repair from wind etc.
With cell phones, however, companies just need to put up a tower in a few spots to cover a wide area. No dismantling and theft, and because people get cell phones easier, they also use the phone more. There’s even a secondary market, where people with small shops sell phone time and charging time (running the generator to charge the phone). My church group collects money for solar lamps that cost 30 Euros, which have a solar module for charging the lamp, and a dozen different plugs so the module can also charge cell phones.
By contrast, unless you’re working in a city and earning good money, I see little need in a rudimentary agrarian society for watches.
It may be difficult to correlate lack of watch with mobile phone use in any part of the world. Lack of watch may be correlated to lack of need for a watch, which is not linked to need for a phone.
It’s worth focusing carefully on what many people are saying here, that they don’t wear a watch. I am one of those, as is my wife. We literally don’t need watches, as we are surrounded by clocks in our daily lives.
Apart from clocks on mobile phones, there are clocks on computers, cookers, TVs and many other kinds of electronics. We have clocks in our bedroom to wake us up. We have other clocks in our house. There are public clocks everywhere. *
*(OK I’ve got to add this.
And if I wake up in the middle of the night in a strange town, and with no clocks anywhere near me, I have my trumpet. Yes, my trumpet. I lean out the window and start playing it. Almost immediately someone will shout “What the @#@# are you doing playing a trumpet at four o’clock in the morning?” )*
very balsy, doing that in an unknown place. i’ll just wait till rays of light filter past the window.
The are cheap digital watches that just turn off. We were always buying the Bin Laden/90210 watches to give as gifts back home, but they never lasted more than a week. I can’t recall seeing nicer watches int he market, but they must have existed- but they would have gone through a much more circuitous path to the market than the stuff that came in huge bags straight from China.
I’m sure it varies by area, but there wasn’t a huge need where I lived. Few people had a lot of fixed appointments, and life moved to the rhythms of the call to prayer. I had a clock up in my yard as a novelty, and now and then people would stop by to look at it, but the attitude was along the lines of “why would you really need a machine to tell you what time it is? Isn’t it obvious?”