Posted on 08/25/2013 2:26:44 PM PDT by rhema
Cell phones today in America are of course endemic, if not epidemic. On one of the thoroughfares in the youthful neighborhood in which I live, I can sometimes walk an entire block without passing anyone not on or gazing down at or thumb-pumping his or her cell phone. Everyone has seen three or four people sitting at a restaurant table, each one of them on a cell phone. Or a young couple who should be looking longingly into each other’s eyes looking instead into their cell phones. Just yesterday a homeless man, in front of the Whole Foods in our neighborhood, his cup extended for change in one hand, was talking loudly into the cell phone held in his other hand. Contemporary America might have a homelessness but certainly not a phonelessness problem.
The homeless man’s cell phone was not a smartphone, but a flip phone, rather, I am a touch nervous to confess, like my own. My nervousness derives from my being so out of date as still to be toting around a flip, or what I have taken to calling a dumb, phone. Taking out a flip phone in some circles is tantamount to carrying an ear trumpet—it’s almost quaint.
Only two people have my cell phone number, and weeks go by in which I never use my dumb phone. Still, I don’t often leave the house without it. I carry it around in case some strange emergency should occur in which I would need a phone: I get a flat tire in a distant part of town, I fall and injure myself, I lose my wallet. The one thing I don’t have to worry about is thugs mugging me in order to steal my phone, at least not when they notice it isn’t a smartphone.
I bought my first cell phone roughly 20 years ago. I bought it for my wife, who was traveling frequently between Chicago and South Bend, Indiana, where her aged and ill mother was living. The point of having the cell phone was security. If her car broke down on the Indiana Toll Road, she could use the phone to call for help. The car never did break down, but we kept the cell phone, on which I paid a monthly fee of $36, or roughly $400 a year. Then someone told me that I need pay only $25 a quarter if I went into a nearby AT&T shop and “refilled” my phone every three months, at $25 a shot. At $100 a year, I acquired a second dumb phone—one for me, one for my wife. But the bargain isn’t what is at stake.
The truth is that I am wary of having a smartphone. I already feel sufficiently enslaved by computers and digital culture. I can no longer write at more than a few paragraphs’ length except on my computer. (Solzhenitsyn wrote a good portion of his Gulag books in the smallest possible hand on toilet paper.) I must check my email 20 times a day, including first thing in the morning. I do not myself tweet, but I read the tweets of a few friends and also their Facebook pages. I spend roughly 40 minutes early in the day getting my (mostly unsatisfactory) news online. My computer pings and I rush over to learn the Wall Street Journal has discovered another hedge-fund guy guilty of insider trading, or three bombs have gone off in downtown Islamabad, news that could have waited. Digital life, with its promise of keeping one up to the moment, is very jumpy.
So why, then, do I need to carry a computer around with me, for smartphones have of course become portable computers. Do I require Google in my pocket, a permanent aid to memory, so I can check something as important as who pitched the fifth game of the 1945 World Series? Do I really need apps that will give me stock-market quotations, or let me play video games, or provide Baroque string quartets while I am in the bathroom? I have no need for these artificial distractions.
The mind, the rabbis tell us, is a great wanderer. In its wanderings it often comes upon memories of dear but now dead friends, interesting connections between dissimilar notions, random observations, ideas for stories and essays. No app exists to organize the wandering mind, thank goodness.
Early in the twentieth century, Degas was dining at the home of his friend the painter Jean-Louis Forain, a man who prided himself on keeping up with his time and who therefore had one of the early telephones installed in his house in Paris. In the middle of dinner, the phone rang, and Forain leapt from the table to answer it. “Ah,” said Degas, “the telephone. Now I understand. It rings, you jump.”
Think I’ll stay with my dumb phone.
Dumb Phone = 0bama phone?
I’ve carried a cell phone for business reasons for almost 20 years, but I have never owned one that can take pictures, if I could have found batteries I would still be using my first one, I will be getting rid of my cell phone within a few months.
No need for a smartphone here. PC does all I could want, and on a screen that my eyes can easily see. Don’t like being tricked into a deceptively expensive data plan, either.
And the point of this guys snooty article is?
I use a cheap Tracfone.
I have a Samsung flip phone. Cheapest one I could find. Does what I need it to do. I’m on 24 hour call. My old, old, old one finally died. Took it out back, and shot it with my Redhawk 44 mag. It felt good!
"The younger GPS generation was lost when their screens went dark. Their brains had been wired from early childhood to be led and directed from point to point by computer-generated voices and pixel arrows. By the time the grid went down most people were incapable of learning to navigate by map and compass, and anyway, almost nobody had them. I was the rare exception, already equipped with a Silva Ranger compass, my Appalachian Trail topo maps, guide books, and my previous summers’ experience hiking the Trail.
"As soon as the power was lost, there were no more computer-generated dropdown menus full of helpful suggestions to the traveler. No Google, no Bing, no search engines at all. The screen addicts couldn’t light a fire with an entire pack of matches: I’d seen them wasting match after match in the rain. The concept of dry kindling wood had escaped their educations entirely. After their matches and butane lighters were used up during the first winter, they froze to death, providing gear, clothing, and eventually the meat from their very bodies to the more ruthless and better prepared. I’d seen their campsites, and I’d seen their bones. I’d worn their boots."
Thank goodness, indeed!
Being recently retired I am thrilled to be untethered from my cell phone, text messages and my laptop. I carry my semi-dumb cell phone only when my wife says I need to be available or when I am along in the woods cutting firewood.
Your cell phone only own’s you if you let it. I remember David Brinkley doing a commentary at the end of one of his shows. The memorable quote was this:
“When was the last time someone called you, that wanted to do something for you? When I’m busy, I don’t answer the phone!”
I have an iPhone and live by Mr. Brinkley’s example. That way, I always have a handy tool and I control myself.
When I bought my first cell phone eight years ago, I bought a flip phone that could take pictures. After all, I reasoned, I might see a UFO or the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot and, if I had a camera in my phone, I could get a picture. However, after that phone self-destructed in my pocket one day, I got just a plain old flip phone. Turns out that the only thing I was taking a picture of was the inside of my pocket when I would reach in to answer my phone ...
Now, I know, all word's that end with an 's' require apostrophe's!
I use a cheap Tracfone
Ditto.
It’s in my car, for EMERGENCIES only.
I buy a Pant-Load of minutes every year for $100.
I now have over 2800 minutes.
Does anyone remember HELP ?
Highway Emergency Locating Plan?
This is what it’s all about.
The Highway Dept, had phones, located at strategic points along the Interstate.
You gotta problem, find that phone...
I don’t need to “chat” with some ‘Other’ imbecile while I wait for my nail polish to dry.
While I am driving...
“Face Palm”...
DO WANT! When is it out, Matt?
I understand the author's message. Our home telephone has an answering machine, that speaks the caller ID if any. We don't directly pick up the phone, unless it's an ID we recognize. Even then, we often let the caller leave a message and we respond later. 9 times out of 10 a no-ID call will not leave a message, usually an unsolicited spam call. We hate the intrusion into our lives, and won't let the phone control us. Our cellphones are dumb phones that we buy time for as needed, real cheap and anonymous, used sparingly only as needed. It's a tool that we control.
I was laid off, and I blame it (conveniently) on the VP of my department, and on my foolishness to contradict him. He was a gung-ho IT type who tended to believe his own BS, whatever served the VP’s above him interests of the moment. A company man through and through. One time he told us of a business trip and to justify some new policy, I forget what it was, he said that at the local international airport (one of the 6 biggest in the US) there were no more payphones. This happened 6-7 years ago. Next time I flew, I remembered to check. There were payphones. After returning, I reported my discovery to the eager ears in the department kitchenette. The word must have reached him (I theorize, as it fits so well my scenario.)
I gave up my smart phone a few years ago. Watching a movie or doing anything on a 2in screen is dumb. I'm enjoying saving that money much more than I ever enjoyed that spy phone.
Tomorrow?
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