this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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[–] rainwall@piefed.social 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Camera phones existed, but were very uncommon. Same with GPS. Nokia "candy bar" phones were the most common at the time.. It looks like 2002 was when nokia first added GPS to its phones.

I think you've mashed 2000-2010 together into one big "cellphones had cameras and GPS before smartphones" year in your head. They were still very basic in 2002, most barely having web browsers.

All of this glosses over the fact that cellphones were not ubiqoutus in 2002, and the ones that people used at the time rarely had camera/GPS, much less any concept of a "phone app" or "social media." It would have been much easier to "get lost" both actively and passivly back then because you werent surrounded by people brandishing data harvesting/broadcasting devices all around you.

[–] raef@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I did not mash anything together. I was around then. Nokia did not innovate cameras or GPS, so it's a useless example. In fact, I never even owned one: Motorola, Kyocera, Panosonic... Yes, it's almost impossible to get lost nowdays and it's different than it was then. I do not disagree with your main sentiment, just the categorical portrayals

[–] rainwall@piefed.social 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

So you owned an uncommon phone with uncommon features in 2002, and youre using this to assert that these features were common at the time?

At a time when only 20-30% of people had cellphones, having one of the 5% of those cellphones with a camera or GPS was pretty uncommon. It means at any given point, less than 1% of people would be able to take your picture, much less post it to the "nowhere" that was social media at the time.

[–] raef@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

First of all, not "an" but several, and secondly, I did not assert anything like that. I told you I agreed. I was just pushing against the firm "no" and "none"s you were throwing out.