In an article on the social impact of new technologies, The New York Times reports on how cell phones (and digital video recorders) are changing people:
"As the sociologist Erving Goffman observed in another context, there is something deeply disturbing about people who are ''out of contact'' in social situations because they are blatantly refusing to adhere to the norms of their immediate environment. Placing a cellphone call in public instantly transforms the strangers around you into unwilling listeners who must cede to your use of the public space, a decidedly undemocratic effect for so democratic a technology. Listeners don't always passively accept this situation: in recent years, people have been pepper-sprayed in movie theaters, ejected from concert halls and deliberately rammed with cars as a result of rude behavior on their cellphones."
A little later on, the article continues with,
"The cellphone, like the mirror, also offers a great deal of gratification to our egos. By making us available to anyone at any time, it serves as a ''publicization of emotional fulfillment,'' as the French sociologist Chantal de Gournay has argued. Answering the phone and entering into conversation immediately informs everyone around us that we are in demand by someone, somewhere. Like a security blanket, the cellphone and other wireless devices serve as a form of connection when we are alone -- walking down the street, standing in line -- and connection is our contemporary currency."
As usual, I am often ahead of the times both in my changes in comportment and my social critique. On this last point, I have been railing against what I call 'cell phone zombies' for a while now. These are the losers who talk loud in a store or in the Tim Horton's booth beside you, check their cell phones as soon as they come out of a movie, and talk in the library. (More than one fashionista bimbo has felt my wrath at the Concordia Library.)
(On that last point, I have also coined the term Hotmail Zombies to qualify those mindless students who, attracted like flies to shit, instantly hop on whatever free computer is around, to check their Hotmail messages. Again, there are a lot of them at Concordia.)
La Presse highlighted the cell-phone dependence with an article last weekend. My favorite anecdote is the one where the cell phone user immediately picks up his phone in a crowd, begins talking in to it, and then the phone actually rings…
As for me, for many years now, I take pleasure in actually forgetting my cell phone at home, and most of the time, can't even be bothered to actually listen to the messages on it. (Ask HCW™!) In fact, hewing to a post-modern fashion, my cell phone is used more as a watch than anything else.
The article ends with this:
"As a society, we need to approach our personal technologies with a greater awareness of how the pursuit of personal convenience can contribute to collective ills. When it comes to abortion or Social Security, we avidly debate the claims of individual freedom against other goods. Why shouldn't we do the same with our private technologies?"
'nuff said.
