However, the emergence of wireless technology as a viable and dynamic communications medium will only be realized with a fundamental shift in the way consumers perceive their mobile devices. Already, across Europe and Asia, consumers and business professionals of all ages rely on their mobile devices as personal productivity tools. Take Finland, the home to many of the world's leaders in wireless communications, for example. In Finland, more than eighty percent of teenagers between the ages of 12 and 20 carry mobile devices. Many mobile youths rely on their phones or pagers for e-mail, chat services and entertainment.
Professionals depend on their mobile devices for flight schedules, stock trading and commerce.
These dynamic applications are just beginning to emerge in the United States. As the wireless industry, both domestically and worldwide, develops the new technologies and services that will drive wireless communications forward, success will be largely dependent on the education of mobile consumers about the spectrum of feasible wireless content and services available to them. It will also depend on marketers' willingness to embrace the mobile medium as a viable channel through which to target advertising. New Models for Communication and Interaction Think for a moment about the birth of the television age, during which the natural tendency was to create programming that followed the prescribed pattern for the more established radio medium. The first time television networks produced the nightly news, the cameraman simply pointed the cameras at the anchorman as he read the news with his eyes on the sheets before him.