The Curse of Blog
It’s time for a rant… Sadly.
I hate cellphones.
I have difficulty figuring out how these little beeping boxes became so odious to me, but I imagine it’s based on my perception of those who use them. I grew up in a household with one phoneline. Because of the amount of business my parents do and the fact that my friends are usually the ones to call me, there was often a great deal of tie up on the phone lines. This was especially problematic when I would be downstairs working in my room, very close to a telephone and it would ring. Naturally, I would be the one to pick it up, simply because it wasn’t practical for my parents to stand at the top of the stairs and shout at me that the call was for me. (Considering my room was on the other end of the basement to the stairs and a prefered having my door closed, needless to say, it was impossible to notify me of a call.) So in the end, I ended up becoming the ‘subterannean secretary’ taking nearly every call made. (Since my voice deepened relatively early, I also was assumed to be the man of the house when a telemarketer called, needless to say, I should have charged my parents for the amount of spam calls I would block.)
Although the phone line was important to our family, it wasn’t *that* important. Most calls were my friends, or notifications to my mother or father about their business, and occassional my mother would tie up the phone for four to eight hours every year while she caught up with her sister in Ottawa. (I’d *love* to see that phonebill.) But in the end, like I said, the phone wasn’t crucial to our social survival. When we finally did get a cellphone, we guarded the number like it was a dirty family secret. The cell phone was intended for long car trips, solely for making outgoing calls to get emergency service on the side of the road, or for directions. It was never a social tool, and so I ended up growing up with that notion in mind. It was a tool, not a gab machine.
So of course my first response to any and all cellphone users who use it for entertainment and socializing are very foolish. These people chew up minutes to talk to people because they apparently have enough time to gab but not enough to actually meet these people in person and not involve everyone in earshot on the coversation.
What particular gets in my craw are the cellphones that go off during class. This is a complicated issue. Just like wearing a hat, sometimes people forget they have their cellphone with you. (Even thought it’s usually $50 to a couple hundred dollars of technology, but then, we’ve all lost our several thousand dollar cars in the Wal-Mart parking lot one in awhile.) But what bothers me most is when someone actually calls these people, even when their cellphones are on. Have we become so disjointed out of our friend’s lives that we are not only needing to call them at all hours of the day, but we cannot even take a stab at the fact that they may be in a class? (I specify class because movie theatre visits aren’t as highly scheduled as are classes, but then, if you forget you have your cellphone on when you to the pictures, you are asking for it.)
But the fact that we need to be in constant communication with friends makes cell phone users seem a lot more superficial and less real. If you are constantly updating your friends with the latest minute to minute information, then what purpose do you have for hanging out with them except for an activity. Face to face conversations, multi-threaded, multi-user chats become fewer and fewer, and we end up having less things to say when we are together with our friends. Communication breaks down from the sense of community to that of networks.
When you tell your friends good news at the pub, the information diseminates in a relatively equal way. When you do so over a cellphone, it is often a single point of contact, and either your single friend tells another while you tell another, or the information exchange ends there. The entire concept simply drives away the sense of community. Having grown up on the borderline between this world of community and network, I often feel like the cellphone is destroying culture.
We as a culture become more insular, our tribes become more selective. Where once a conversation could permit the inclusion of others outside of the circle to join in, we have become so guarded that the majority of meaningful communication comes in the form of passive notes, and whsipering into a tin can connected to a string.
Cellphones kill nations, cities, neighbourhoods, and communities. Neighbour is just another word for stranger now, and that is very unfortunate.
I hate cellphones because they destroy society.
