March 16th, 2005
Keep It In Your Pants
Thinking more about the technophile/neo-luddite dichotomy I wrote about yesterday made me realize I have something to say about a very controversial topic–cell phones. Now this is a hard one, because unlike the McMansion, I know and love many people who own and use cell phones. I understand the complexity of the cell phone-related decision-making process, and the diversity that exists among users of cell phones. I can even see their utility–I myself was a cell phone subscriber for a time, though for most of that time said cell phone existed strictly for emergency use by my beloved girlfriend who had a mobility impairment and an unfortunate habit of running out of gas on the interstate. I don’t really have a problem with that “emergency” cell phone, to which no one has the phone number and which rests in the bottom of the backpack until said emergency strikes. I don’t even have a problem with the folks who have a cell phone instead of a land line, particularly the ones who live so rurally that a land line is impractical. So it’s hard to generalize. However, here are my thoughts and observations, and you can decide whether any of this applies to you.
The “emergency” cell phone is teetering on the lip of a very slippery slope, in my opinion. Cause here in the big city, it’s a cell phone culture. People look at you funny when they ask for your cell number and you say you don’t have one. You quickly learn to mutter that pathetic admission of loserhood out of the side of your mouth, eyes downcast in shame, toe sheepishly kicking at the pavement. So if you do have that emergency cell phone, I can imagine the temptation to give out the number in such moments would be overwhelming, just so you don’t look like a great big geek. And it’s all downhill from there.
Because the way I see people using cell phones isn’t, socially speaking, a positive thing. I know I’m not the first to say it, and it probably won’t make any difference, but I’m just going on the record here. I see people out to dinner sitting at a table with a date, talking on a cell phone while said date picks at her salad and looks around, pretending nonchalance, trying to act like she’s not eavesdropping. (Can you even call it eavesdropping when it’s against your will?) I see young women walking down the street three abreast, each with cell phone clamped to her ear. I see people grabbing their cell phones the minute airplane wheels touch tarmac, because they simply must announce their arrival to people they will be seeing in ten minutes inside the terminal. On my last flight, while we were all roiling about like carbonation in seltzer waiting for the boarding doors to open, the guy in the row behind me called to confirm–loudly–his shuttle reservation to a nearby chi-chi upscale resort, lest the rest of us captive plebeians in coach think he was one of us. I’m not even going to get into the crazy things I see people do because one hand is holding the cell phone while they’re trying to drive an automobile.
But what’s been making me squirm the most lately is when I see a young snazzily-dressed white person walking down the street, talking on the cell phone. Because I look at that, and I think, that cell phone is making that person even less likely than she might otherwise be to interact with the people around her. She’s not even observing what’s going on around her, much less interacting with her environment. This is wrong and dangerous in oh-so-many ways. At the Hallmark level, when we’re talking on the cell phone, we’re not looking at the sky, or the snow on the bare tree branches, or the budding flowers pushing through the dirt, or the cat on the windowsill. We’re not hearing birdsong. Even more of our precious moments on this planet become about using technology to escape the moment, rather than experiencing it fully.
For another thing, this kind of distraction on the street breaks the first rule of self-defense for women, that we should always be paying attention to who and what is around us, wherever we are.
For another thing, the neighborhoods I frequent are undergoing some serious transitions, otherwise known as “gentrification,” and in settings like that, the cell phone becomes a tool to extend the already extreme detachment and separation that characterizes white people’s behavior towards black people in this city, and to emphasize the already deep class differences that exist here.
People, using that cell phone in this way destroys whatever investment you might previously have had in creating goodwill among the people around you. You’ve got 911 at the touch of a button, so you don’t have to spend time assessing whether it’s safe for you to be where you are. (Never mind that your ravished skeleton could be picked clean by vermin years before the police respond to your call, depending on how busy a Saturday night it is.) You and your best friends are instantly accessible to each other, so you have license to be snotty to everyone in your immediate vicinity–why waste the effort to even make eye contact, exchange a smile, engage in the barest, briefest of human connection, with the people you’re passing on the street? You don’t need them, you’ve got Becky on speed dial. You don’t even have to make conversation with your date, fer cryin’ out loud, if the fancy takes you that at that very moment you’d rather be talking to your mother. You don’t have to spend one single minute psychically isolated from contact with a pre-known human. And hence, not only can you be completely disdainful of the rest of us, those of us you don’t know, who might be (gasp!) different than you–you can call a friend in any spare moment when you might otherwise have to interact with your self. And you know, that just can’t lead anywhere good.
