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Ordinary people like Luke Johnson sit at the intersection of social networking and the cell phone. Searching for something new that he could do involving video-sharing site YouTube.com, Johnson woke up one night with an idea: Why not post his cell-phone number on the Internet and see how many people were willing to call a complete stranger?
“I didn’t think anybody has ever put their cell-phone number on the Internet and asked basically the entire world to give them a call,” he said.
He woke his wife to tell her about the plan.
“She thought I was nuts,” Johnson recalled.
Johnson, 26, went ahead with his social experiment anyway, and the Luke Johnson Phone Experiment was born. He posted a short video on the YouTube video-sharing site, listing his phone number and urging people to call him and pass the word on to their friends.
Before posting the video, however, Johnson planned ahead and bought a second cell phone to use exclusively for the project. Johnson said that he already has service with Verizon Wireless, but he wanted to keep the project-related calling costs under control. He also didn’t want to sign a long-term contract for an experiment that might not pan out.
“I knew that if this doesn’t take off, I don’t want to be stuck with a contract,” he said. So Johnson, who lives in Gilbert, Ariz., (outside of Phoenix) and works for a for-profit school, checked into Leap Wireless International Inc.’s Cricket service, and eventually signed up for a flat-rate, $45-per-month plan.
Johnson’s YouTube video, clocking in at one minute, 12 seconds, simply shows him talking to the camera, holding his phone and explaining his scheme.
“I don’t care why you call, and I don’t care what you say, but I’ll answer as many calls as I can,” Johnson says in the video. “My goal is to have my phone ringing off the hook day and night, and to receive calls from people all over the world.”
And that has been exactly what he received. For the first week, Johnson said he was averaging between two and four hours a sleep a night as he tried to cope with the flood of phone calls.
“The calls just started coming every half-second,” he recalled. “I’d be talking to someone and I’d get beeped in by about four other people—and they were short conversations as it was!”
As of early this week, Johnson had recorded 6,781 phone calls from more than a dozen countries. International callers, he said, have generally “been good about knowing when it’s daylight here,” and his favorites are calls from the United Kingdom who sign off with “Cheers!”
Johnson said that most people are encouraging—even if they do question his sanity.
“Most people say, ‘Are you nuts?’” Johnson said. “I’m like, ‘A little bit, yeah, maybe.’ About 75 percent say, ‘This is genius, man, you’re brilliant! Keep it going!’”
He said that after the first major response, the calls have been coming in waves as word of the video makes its way to a new radio station or Web site.
“I won’t say it’s been an easy experiment. It has been really taxing on me at times. Especially the first week, I was exhausted,” Johnson said. Still, he added, every time he thinks about calling it quits, “someone else gives me a call about it, asking about it. I think I’ll just keep going until it fizzles.”
Johnson said he recently received his first phone bill from Cricket—and, true to advertising, it was $45. He said he’d been nervous about whether international calls might affect the bill, but those fears turned out to be groundless.
“The bill’s been where they said it would be, so I was pretty happy about that,” he said.
So at the very least, Johnson won’t have to worry about paying overage for his 15 minutes of wireless fame.
