Flirting with Bluetooth?
The New Republic has a highly anecdotal article about Bluetooth-enabled cell phones that, if true, reinforces William Gibson's observation that the street finds its own use for things.
[T]he mating call of choice in Muslim countries today is the wireless digital telegram--a discrete medium for surreptitious flirting and hooking up that circumvents authoritarian strategies for repressing casual sex. In patriarchal societies like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait or hard-line regimes like Iran, methods for preventing unchaperoned dating range from legal restrictions on non-familial mixing between the sexes to tough social taboos, reinforced at home and at school, that render frontal flirtation all but impossible.
Mobile phones, now widely in use by teens and twentysomethings throughout the Middle East, enable swinging singles to tiptoe around these roadblocks: A group of boys can appear to be hanging with each other when they're really chatting it up with girls across the hall. And, thanks to Bluetooth technology, which renders phone numbers unnecessary by enabling short-range, anonymous signaling, it's even possible for a boy and a girl to meet and mingle without any prior arrangement. Small wonder some Muslim clerics in the Gulf and elsewhere have called for a Bluetooth ban.
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