"We have to stop thinking about 'my' cellphone and start thinking about 'our' cellphone," Joel Ross told me. A pretty cheeky statement, considering that we'd only met a few minutes before.

But then the UC-Irvine grad student was not trying out a high-tech pick-up line. During a demo at the second annual HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Sciences, Technology Advance Collaboratory) conference
last Friday, he was explaining an effort by his school's Department of
Informatics to cut down on the waste produced by the millions of
cellphones that are tossed out every year.

As Ross pointed
out, there are 3 million cellphones in use at present, each one likely
to be tossed out about 17 months after purchase. That makes for a lot
of landfill, some of it potentially toxic. Rather than try to cut down
on the number of phones, researchers at UC-Irvine are trying to cut
back on the number of components that go into each phone by allow users
to share features across a network of phones in close proximity to each
other -- or what the geeks call "Human Mediated Networking."

So
if you have a GPS in your phone, you could share the device with
everyone else who has a phone nearby. What's in it for you? Well, maybe
somebody else in the network would have a pollution sensor or a Geiger
counter on her phone. Everybody could bring a different component that
everyone could share across the network.

Wait a minute: a Geiger
counter? The happy future where cellphone users share their tools and
produce less waste is suddenly seeming a little scary: We're all going
to be walking around in a cloud of radiation? If that's where we're
headed, then we're definitely going to need to count on a little help
from our friends -- and their cellphones.