I am concerned about my cell phone: well, not so much about my cell phone as about how it is affecting my life.
It all began a couple of months ago when I decided to upgrade. I had been getting increasingly annoyed that I could not match my friends’ cool ring tones, could not unnoticed take digital photos and instantly email them to the subject, but above all self-conscious because the phone I had owned for three years was, well, just old! So I made the move.
My previous upgrade had been a sterile experience, undertaken as a member of an unsupervised herd standing elbow to elbow at Best Buy. I chose from among lifeless lumps of monochrome plastic densely packed on dreary shelves of calculators and pagers, selecting a utilitarian device that ever since has lain around, mostly in my car or brief case, an unloved brick that only occasionally slipped into my pocket.
This time it was radically different. The entrance to the chic company-owned store greeted me with an enthusiastic smile, and an array of devices of multiple colors, shapes and sizes was paraded in front of me. “Now this one looks good on you, sir. It has a built in camera with zoom lens, comes with a CD-sized selection of customizable ring tones, including,” (and here the sales rep sized up a middle aged man in jeans and a t-shirt with a shrewd glance), “Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin, it can surf the Internet, and will even wake you up in the morning.” I didn’t ask if it would make a pot of coffee too. As he closed in on a sale, irresistible accessories came pouring out: personalized faceplates of college teams or random colors, cords, batteries, leather cases, and extended calling plans. I left the store walking tall, the proud owner of a designer universal communications device and electronic personal assistant.
So now I have a phone that rarely leaves my hip. A gunslinger on the wild frontier of communications, it has, overnight, become indispensable to me. I relish any chance to use its compact power; even snapping it quickly from its holster to call my wife on the way home and ask if I need to buy milk brings a rush of excitement.
It is far more than its physical appeal that makes my heart beat faster. I love just knowing that I could phone or email at any time almost two thousand people whose addresses it holds. Of course they may not answer, because they have two thousand people calling them, or because my information is out of date. But that’s OK, because if they don’t, I can call someone else instead. Or perhaps someone will call me! I live safe and secure in the knowledge that anyone I might want to talk to has my secret code (cell phone numbers are private, and likely to remain so – none of Verizon, Sprint, and Alltel, together accounting for 45% of cell phone users in the US, are participating in carrier discussions to establish a directory) and can contact me at any time. I feel that I am connected, that I am part of something, that I am important. I now look at the trendy people using trendy phones with the complacent smile of a member of the club.
But this multi-layered illusion is not what it seems. We all know that its simplest layer, that of any-time any-place communications, is easy to dispel, for coverage is not ubiquitous, but rather is riddled with dead spots and plagued by frustrating congested busy periods – just when you most want to talk, you can’t get through! More substantively, it is not economically viable for the cell phone providers to build out their networks in huge tracts of rural America (I still find it a blessing that my phone does not work at the mountain house where we hide away on weekends). An interesting exception is Iridium, a satellite based phone system run by Boeing. Named after the chemical element whose seventy-seven orbiting electrons were an analogy for its constellation of satellites (though the final configuration reduced this number to sixty six), it alone offers truly ubiquitous coverage. Don’t forget to take one with you next time you walk to the South Pole, so that you can call for a pizza delivery, wish your mother Happy Birthday, and even dial for emergency assistance. All this for less than $2 per minute (plus monthly charge and a thousand dollar phone) – I don’t think network congestion will be a problem!
A deeper illusion is that owning a sexy phone makes me a more complete and attractive person. My nine-year-old daughter, who has developed a taste for clothes from Limited Too and is busy outgrowing Hillary Duff and Brittney Spears, has begun to agitate for a cell phone. She wants it not for its utility, but because it is a fashion item that will, like the new jacket Santa brought, transform her into living culture, the envy of her friends. I have resisted so far, but the dialog will intensify as her enthusiasm waxes with her years. If a camera phone with bells and whistles that allows her to chat with her trendy friends from the safety and comfort of home, and share photos and play games with them remotely, reduces her desire to drive a car on Georgia roads that kill four people every day, then she will have one. But while this will make her happier and safer – and depending upon the calling plans, potentially save Daddy a lot of money! – it will not make her a richer, deeper person.
But the greatest illusion is one of power and control. The evolution of my smart phone promises me freedom from frustrating human interactions with graceless incompetents and from the encumbrance of location-specific activities, but this all comes at the price of increasing dependence on the phone itself. In South Korea cell phones are routinely used to control home appliances such as air conditioning, garage doors, and lights; to watch video clips; and to monitor and report medical information, such as blood sugar level for diabetics. This technology will soon become common in the US and Europe, too, and within a few years cell phones promise to become electronic wallets and credit cards, iPod-like storage devices for all your books and music – and perhaps videos and personal information – even interactive online gaming machines. As the bank, secretary, and knowledgeable store assistant all disappear, victims of the relentless drive of technological efficiency, so too will our everyday human interactions, replaced by electronic aerial transactions. Our dependence will grow, so that soon a network outage will render us as helpless as the black outs of 2004,which starkly illuminated the extent to which our modern life is unlivable without the “convenience” of the power grid that holds us prisoner.
The perception that the cell phone gives us power over our lives is an inversion of reality. This reversal has happened before: the internal combustion engine was an enormously liberating invention that allowed us to travel great distances, but in its pervasive influence on a culture of central business districts, vast shopping malls and distributed entertainment, holds us in servitude, and along the way has enabled the destruction of community and tradition – the zombifying Wal*Mart homogenization of America has been enabled by universal automobile. Similarly television, a device whose distance education and altruistic functions excited its early promoters, instead provides twenty-four hour embedded coverage of wars, exposes Janet Jackson on the Superbowl to tens of millions, and injects pulp into its prominent and socially worrisome role as one of the greatest influences in modern life.
Just as the jailor is slave to his prisoner, the alcoholic to the drug that once allowed him to escape, and the gambler to the ongoing promise of salvation through Lotto, so too do we become captive of the cell phone. Submission to that which we seek is part of human nature. We identify income, possessions, and career as a means by which we can improve our lives and liberate ourselves from suffering and hardship, but as we pour our lifeblood into their inhumanity and objectify them we succumb to the same inversion of power, allowing that which once we sought for good to assume increasing control of our lives. We have become prisoners of a consumer society, of a capitalist democracy, and are unable from within our bars to see the extent of this truth.
This has been well recognized and popularized; Kafka and Camus wrote of humankind as prisoner of the system. Wagner’s Ring Cycle is an allegory of the interactions gods and titans with a hoard of gold and a magic ring, each possessor in turn lacking the art and ambition to use it, and not recognizing the extent to which it is useless to them, succumbing to death in its curse. Eric Fromm authored a seminal work, “Escape From Freedom” in the shadow of German Fascism, in which he argued that misguided human nature is prone to take the easy path, running from the dangers and responsibilities of freedom to elevate in their stead an arbitrary power to be exalted and served. However, we still do not see it in our daily lives, just as we do not see the influence of cell phones.
The rapid advance of technology will render the power inversions of the past trivial. Within two decades cell phones have evolved from a cumbersome curiosity of the rich (remember bag phones?) to a near ubiquitous convenience we take for granted, and at the same time as their capabilities have increased exponentially. If we can begin to see this power inversion with cell phones, then perhaps we can also begin to see it in the hundreds – the thousands – of small things that are taking control of corners of our lives, and will begin to see how in the larger context we are giving up our freedom to modern technology, to modernity itself.
The cell phone is a perfect lens through which to see this effect because it plays to so many of our weaknesses. My parents used to be able to go out for a few hours and leave their work at the office, their children with the babysitter, and their worries to another day. But I cannot; instead, I must take my cell phone with me, for something may occur that I need to deal with urgently.
Where did these crises come from? Why do I need the babysitter to be able to call my cell phone, whereas my parents (whose were far from negligent – in fact their sense of responsibility drove me nuts!) were happy if the babysitter just knew where they were? We create new and innovative ways of being tracked down by the babysitter – and anyone else – in an attempt to be in control, whereas in fact it the opposite is true. To set oneself up at the beck and call of others, and even to succumb to the desire to call “just to check everything is OK” – “I want to hear my child’s voice right now” – is to surrender control. How can the banal juvenile nonsense of so many cell phone conversations – “Where are you?” “What are you going?” – that reduces us to gibbering idiots thoughtlessly twittering away be regarded as control? All this is putting the rest of the world in charge of your life. I find the self-delusion of control that accompanies the growing use of electronic communication to be truly shocking.
But it is almost irresistibly seductive and alluring. Cell phones allow us to satisfy a basic human need: to feel connected, important and useful. Whether contacting others to volunteer time and views, or answering calls with useful information or advice, we are offering something valuable, and therefore proving our importance. Being available by phone any time, anywhere, inflates our sense of self-worth and self-importance. In fact, if you don’t have a cell phone, or have one and are not using it right now, does that not mean you are less important, less needed, than the person you are having lunch with who is?
When we talk of the desire for instant gratification, it is usually a sarcastic and self-deprecatory comment on modern society, uttered without insight into the true extent to which modern technology and material affluence allow for it. I take the ice maker in my refrigerator, the super-heated water tap by the sink, the espresso machine for granted, and with them the ability to drink anything I want whenever I want. My extensive DVD and CD collections and sophisticated audio and video reproduction capabilities – in my living room, bedroom, and even my car! – allow me to immediately satisfy any entertainment urge. The wealth of searchable information on the Internet allows me to answer any question of fact almost instantly.
The cell phone is evolving into the controller of our conveniences, and the gateway to instant entertainment and information. With improved battery life, enhanced acoustics, and greater bandwidth that permits real web surfing, it is extending the opportunities for instant gratification – anything, anytime, anywhere – deeper into our lives.
It is not enough to attain instant gratification; we seek to couple it with constant stimulation. The flickering chaotic images of MTV have become our everyday lives, as we change the scene with dramatically increasing rapidity, channel surfing in our daily lives from one activity to another. We leave the actual and metaphorical TV of constant action always on, uncomfortable being left alone with our own thoughts.
The need for distraction is reaching epidemic proportions. Waiting areas are now distraction rooms, designed for contemplating such weighty material as Oprah, Geraldo, and the thirty-second sound bites that now count for news while we sit at the dentist, the airport, or the car service center. Even the DMV has succumbed, and imposed Court TV on me recently while waiting for my registration renewal. The proliferating TV distractions add to the trays of forgettable magazines, tempting multitasking. My children carry their Gameboys everywhere, engaging in a few seconds of electronic interaction at every chance, and asserting boredom if ever they forget them or I disallow their use.
Solitude is no longer time alone, taken to reflect, or even just to sit, but is time actively distracted from everyday cares. My daughter goes to her room and turns on music, pulls out her Gameboy, or picks up the phone to call a friend. Gyms offer banks of TV’s, and my neighborhood streets are filled with puffing and panting joggers, not enjoying peace in their solitude, but instead mouthing the songs that pour through their headphones to amplify their tranquility.
Cell phones take this to a new level. With a universal communicator, a digital camera and an electronic photo library tucked in your purse, you can respond to the threat of an idle moment by taking pictures, or leafing through old ones. You can even use your library as mindless time filler when conversation lapses, or when you lack the willingness or ability to think. Wireless data permits the constant and instant propagation of these artifacts to create an omnipresent electronic sea of distraction – even at a recent visit to The Metropolitan Opera in New York I saw patrons mutter mindless banalities into their glamorous accoutrements to fill the intermission. Cars stream out of office parking decks at the end of the business day and fill the airwaves with chatter, and diners or latte drinkers at Starbucks will interrupt a conversation to cut Thomas Dolby (remember “She Blinded Me With Science” from 1983? He now writes ring tones!) short and talk into their phone, not just once, but repeatedly. How many of the important confidential business conversations that are articulated one-sidedly for all to hear on airplanes and in shopping malls really matter?
My coworkers in my corporate job are all equipped with “crack-berrys” (actually Blackberrys), pager-sized devices for real time wireless email that clip to your belt. While they certainly have great utility, allowing you to request that piece of information you need while in a meeting, or to quickly delegate work, they have taken over! Whenever two or more employees are gathered together in one place, one of them will emit a jangle or a buzz to indicate the arrival of an “ipage” to which they will involuntarily direct hand and eye, and the conversation will stop. This grating noise can occur at any time – while conducting business with a customer, or having a social lunch with a colleague – and the result will be the same: the recipient instantly becomes silent. Only a conversation with the boss and personal delivery of a formal public presentation are exempt. In large meetings – and I attend more of these than I care to mention – I am constantly surprised to see maybe a quarter or a half of the people reading or writing ipages at any time.
When I respond to my ipager or answer my cell phone, I completely forget whatever else I was doing; others in moments of candor have acknowledged to me that they will do likewise. Therefore I have developed the habit of shutting up and waiting whenever someone I am talking to drops their gaze to attend to their crackberry. Typically my conversant, oblivious, will look up once finished with, “sorry about that, now where were we?”
Arguments abound about the need for an “e-Emily Post” for cell phone usage, that such a set of manners will arise with time and experience. Humbug! The behavior we see has nothing to do with etiquette. People are designed to respond to alarms, whether it is a baby crying, the sight of a fire, or the roar of a lion in the brush; the jangle of an electronic communications device is just such an alarm, and requires immediate attention. If anything, the etiquette that needs to develop is patience on the part of the interrupted person – who should perhaps use this time to have electronic interactions of his or her own! While I would like to see people turning off phones at inappropriate times, such as at the movies, even this may be asking too much, and perhaps I should not be surprised at the number of people who ignore requests to do so. In fact, there are private clubs and exclusive resorts and vacation neighborhoods that have resorted to installing scrambling devices to prevent cell phones from working on their premises!
In this power inversion cell phone users submit not so much to their phones as to the entire network of cell phones. In engineering and telecommunications, the “law of networks” states that a network’s power is proportional to the square of the number of users. As cell phones become pervasive, the network power becomes huge, and in my estimation comes to vastly exceed that of the traditional telephone network, not because of the number of devices, but because the ubiquitous connection type means more people are connected at any time, and their activities will ultimately be vastly more diverse.
Plugging into the network attaches you to others’ devices, but as a number, not a free man; in communication you turn into a disembodied, digitally rendered voice, or a string of text in an email. You are valuable only for the information you impart, whether that is to answer a question on the phone, to make a move in an online backgammon game, or simply to respond to banality with triviality and let the caller pass dead time. You cease to be a person to anyone but yourself, instead becoming part of the machine, a terminal on the edge of another user’s electronic network. And there are myriad other interactive networks – email and on-line gaming, for example – collectively creating an environment which demands ever more of our time as we voluntarily immerse ourselves in everyone else’s machine.
As we spend more and more of our lives in electronic interactions, we lose the richness of human interaction, communication not just in words but through expression, body movements and posture, and pheromones, contact that can even be physical. When as a child I was sick, the best parental communication was when my parents sat silently by the bedside, exuding warmth and love, and occasionally stroking my sweaty infant’s brow or holding my quivering hand. How can they have done this electronically?
Real conversation is not just more than just words; it is also contextual. A conversation with my wife about the beauty of Sanibel Island is far more meaningful if we are walking barefoot along the sand together than if I call her from the restaurant where I am lunching and interrupt her conversation at Starbucks. A shared experience of reality helps real, full-body communication, and is why talking to your passenger in the car is different from talking on the phone; the passenger is there with you, and is not just responsive to conditions – “Let me pick that up”; “a dollar for the toll – here you go,” – but is even another pair of eyes – “Watch out!” “Oh, why don’t you let me help the children in the back?” Talking on a cell phone permits none of this. While the voice on the other end is recognizable, and you create a mental image of the person, in reality the voice is an electronic reconstruction, and the person is a mental construction.
The allure of the network tempts us to incrementally eliminate the physical from our lives, to detach our minds from the world, relegating us to the status of mental processors. We conduct an increasing proportion of our lives in the hermetically sealed sanctity of our offices, homes, automobiles (with in-building parking I can spend a workday without ever going outdoors), electronically intermediating our interactions with people and the physical world. This certainly makes things them safer, quicker, and cleaner, but at the cost of sterility. If we permit our world to become a series of electronic interactions, we will deserve to be regarded as terminals on the end of others’ networks, since that is all we will be. I recall watching an old Star Trek in which a highly evolved race existed as brains in jars, and wondering what kind of life this would really be.
But we do not see the deep and profound social and cultural impact of cell phones, and instead obsess on distractions. Manufacturers churn out new phones features at an astonishing rate to meet “consumer demand”, the government legislates ubiquitous broadband, and society spends ever more time online. Meanwhile citizens live under high tension power lines, sit six feet from the television for hours at a time, eating popcorn made in old leaky microwaves, and worry that electromagnetic radiation emissions from cell phones will cause brain damage. “Patients’ rights activists” and insurance companies fear that cell phone use in hospitals or airplanes will cause interference and hundreds of deaths.
Most recently, there has been heated debate and promulgation of restrictive laws relating to car usage. This makes me laugh out loud and shake my head! Does anyone really doubt that they are materially less safe behind the wheel when using a cell phone? We don’t need the extensive psychological tests that are accompanying an international wave of legislation to tell us this. Simply correlating cell phone use by drivers accurately and routinely with road traffic accidents (information that is technologically readily available from service provider records – why is this not formally done today?), as is done with blood alcohol levels, would yield compelling results.
We continue this debate while cell phone usage spirals ever higher, and the restrictive rules and laws are constantly flouted – I recently read, without surprise, that hospitals are beginning to conclude they are safe, based in large part on the lack of instrument failure caused by this violation, and that airlines are not far behind.
I do not wish to trivialize public safety, for we certainly need to prevent people from unnecessarily acting to endanger others. However, we should see that the move to regulate and legislate cell phone usage is actually a move parallel to their deeper impact on our lives. In a society that is based on freedom, we are participating in another power inversion by abdicating personal responsibility to a set of rules imposed by self-sustaining democracy. By allowing ourselves to get caught up in arguments about how to write the rules, and then about enforcing compliance, we move ever further from questions of deeper truths. By way of analogy, when we asked a friend and the mother of a fourteen year old boy if he could baby-sit, she replied that she wants him to go to babysitting class first. I had never heard of such a thing, and while it is certainly a great idea for a babysitter to be trained in CPR, home safety, and so forth, what struck me is that training will become certification, so that pretty soon we will have state bureaucracies to manage not just babysitter certification, but also babysitter trainer certification, and it will be illegal to baby-sit without a certificate.
So I am concerned about my cell phone. I hear the questions of whether they are safe, and read articles comparing features and styles of different models, but believe these miss the deeper point, which is the sweeping change that networking technology is making to our lives. A cell phone (whether hands-free or not), an ipager, an online computer game, and a chat room all contribute to always-on connectivity. Through them we are each creating a personal illusion of importance and control when in reality we are distracting ourselves from the physical world under our noses and turning ourselves into terminals at the end of an electronic network. As the technology becomes ever more powerful and ubiquitous, we will continue to spend an increasing proportion of our time and attention engaged in electronic network interactions at the expense of physical interaction with the world. Voice response units will become indistinguishable from human voices, and my father-in-law will no longer be able to tell if the moves of his opponent’s backgammon pieces are initiated by human or computer input.
I am concerned, not at the capabilities of my cell phone, which offer me wonderful opportunities to improve the quality of my life, but at the insidious temptation it offers to eliminate the real world from my life, to become a network node. I am concerned that I might cease to pay attention to what is happening right now, and allow the possibility for self-delusion to expand infinitely.