Cell Phone Cyborgs

One sure symptom of incipient geezerhood is becoming a Luddite—an old crank, suspicious and hostile towards newfangled technology. This worries me, as I have been grousing lately about the cell phone. But there are objective factors to consider:

I don’t deny their great utility and convenience for travel, emergencies, and urgent communication, but for too many people they have become a social pacemaker—life is impossible without them! Every 15 minutes, the CP junkie must check for messages and respond immediately, and if there are none, then some traffic must be stimulated by sending out feelers: calls, text messages or snapshots. When a call is received, all other input stimuli must be backburnered: the highway at 70 mph, a dinner conversation, an organ about to be transplanted in the operating room.

I have friends and relatives who flip open while leaning out of the shower, sitting on the throne, riding a bicycle, cooking, eating… there are no boundaries. I suspect that for many a cell phone is integral to their sex life: “Talk to me dirty, then hang up and call back. I’ll switch to vibration mode.”

Then there are the CP prima donnas: frustrated thespians who find a captive audience in a packed airport, bus, or ticket line, and regale the crowd with some personal drama or impressive power talk: “Jensen’s still in Norway?! Then how is he going to meet me in Bangkok? You tell him to call me in Monaco tomorrow, or the deal’s off!” Pity the poor bored soul stuck in an airline layover without a cell phone! The problem is, the poor bored soul is often the CP junkie’s companion, fiddling idly while the junkie conducts business or pleasure far more urgent or compelling than your miserable company.

I would suggest that unless you are on-call in some official capacity, following behind POTUS with the nuclear launch codes, or expecting ransom instructions from a kidnapper, you don’t need to be tethered to your device as permanently as a parolee to an ankle monitor. But that’s the way it’s evolving: on an overnight train ride recently, I groggily awakened to glimpse the woman opposite the aisle, town lights strobing her eerily through the windows, a large Bluetooth headset grafted to her ear as she snoozed in her chair…and for a minute I thought I was experiencing a sci-fi nightmare about futuristic cyborgs, perpetually tuned to bogus Homeland Security alerts and subliminal mind-control messages from the Ministry of Truth (aka Corporate Media): “Terrorists are stalking you this very moment! You have everything to fear, except fear itself. They want to control your body and soul with diabolical national health insurance. But don’t panic—Big Bubba is planning a pre-emptive strike. Vote for Big Bubba.”

Of course, I don’t have a cell phone, which makes it easy for me to decry their sins as I am not enjoying their virtues (the source of all moral self-righteousness). But if I ever do succumb to the CP seduction, I’m going to do it in a big way: when the technology advances, I will dive to the Andrea Doria wreck, 240 ft. down in the Atlantic, with my Divemaster iPhone and text message a climber on the peak of Mt. Everest, setting new records for both vertical distance and wireless histrionics. I imagine it would go like this:

ME: How goes up there?
CLIMBER: White-out. Can’t C thing. U?
ME: Black-out. Can’t C thing. Cold, scary.
CLIMBER: Dittoooooo… sorry, fingers freezing.
ME: Glimpsed 10tacles giant squid!
CLIMBER: Snapshot me?
ME: 10-4. Got my leg!
CLIMBER: Montsteeerrr!... Hands & brain freezzzzig now…
ME: At least we have each other.
CLIMBER: Ditttttooo…