Sunday, November 8, 2009

Phone as Appendage

Okay, so in church this morning, standing in line to get communion, is a teenage girl. Text messaging. I'm...I'm...I'm at a loss.

When I was a little girl, back in the 19-fabulous-60's, we had one phone in the house. It hung on the wall of our kitchen. We had no area codes and if you wanted to call someone outside your town you had to "dial 'O' for operator". It had a rotary dial and it made a te-te-te-te-te-te sound when you let go. For a while, we even had a party line - which meant you had to pick up and listen before you dialed because someone else, living at a completely different address, might be using the shared phone line. There were phone booths everywhere around town and to make a call from them it cost 5 cents. There was only one telephone company - Bell. And guess what? We lived to tell the tale.

And if we were in the mood for correspondence but had nothing more to say than "Hey!", we waited until we had just a bit more on our minds and then we wrote letters, stamped envelops and mailed them (without the "e"). And getting a letter was always really great!

And, in fact we did this through the 60s, through the 70's, through the 1980's and into the 1990's.

Now it is 2009 and I just got my phone bill covering 5 phones. We have a "plan". I assure you, we have spent a lot of time making sure that we have the best possible rate for our use (it is still ridiculous) and it includes "unlimited texting". But one of our phones has 4,792 text messages on it in one month. One month. ONE. I did the math averages. Assuming 30 days with 12 waking hour per day, someone in my family is texting, on average, 13 times an hour. That works out to 1.083 texts every 5 minutes. Who, I BEG tell, has that much to say to anyone?

I'll be the first to admit that I cannot imagine life without my blackberry. But with that said, I am still trying to come to terms with the idea of "phone as appendage". I am all for communication. Cell phones and email and the internet have made life, in many ways easier. But I swear, I would happily give it all up to return to a life with one phone on the wall and a heavily used mailbox outside the front door.

I have spent a little time thinking about why the rampant use of all this communication technology is so offensive to me. And I think I have put my finger on it. The idea that life in general is so unimportant that any moment in life - a quiet moment, a joyful moment, a moment of brilliance, a moment of intensity, of reverence, of intimacy, of importance can and will be interrupted by the buzz of a vibrating cell phone with brain dead messages from any number of several hundred installed "friends" like: "You're hot!" or "whazzup?"or "I'm bored but XOXOXO!!!" is something that makes me want to start slapping people really hard. Then, as if swimming in a sea of stupid, the recipient will invariably and immediately respond to said text, allowing it to take precedence over whatever else might be going on ("I <3 U 2") or some other coded or misspelled message. And I have seen bone heads galore driving around town or on the freeway - one hand on the wheel, the other expertly punching the phone pad to say something that is more important, at that second, than being safe. I have sat in movie theatres and seen the glow of the a multitude of phone pads while people are texting madly. And then, someone at church cannot even focus long enough to free herself from whatever irrelevant conversation she has going. And you may think - "oh c'mon. It's nice to be able to keep in touch so easily." Yes but the arrogance and conceit that one must have to believe that any random thought they think up is worthy of being read, worthy being sent through time and space to satellite and back to earth, worthy being shared at all - astounds me. It's akin to being constantly interrupted by an annoying child - with no one taking a firm had with him. I want to beat the hell out kids like that.

There is some hypocrisy here. I have called people while I am shopping, or I'm in the car (hands free, of course). I couldn't write this blog if not for the same technology that I loathe. But at least I'm not sending it to you. Sadly I have to admit that I am not unlike anyone else in this world of technology and if we're not texting from our cells, we're talking on our cells or we're on Facebook or Skype or iChat and Lord in Heaven !! - does anyone EVER SHUT UP? There is no doubt in my mind that in another hundred years one of our hands will evolve into an iPhone. With apps.

1 comment:

  1. LOL funny post! Following from MBC, hope to see you at http://www.luvsjurn3.blogspot soon!

    ReplyDelete