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 My nervousness derives from my being so out of date as still to be toting around a flip, or what I have taken to calling a dumb, phone.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.
I take it you have not heard that there is now software out there that is being used to spoof “Caller-ID”. It works, too bloody well, and is simple to acquire and implement. And no, I am not interested in providing a link. You will simply have to trust when I tell you that it does work.
The same as the first 40 snooty posters on this thread.
Dittos here, I'm retired, that all the phone I need.
Most of the time it rests in my car's center console.
Regards,
GtG
PS I'm living in a tri-level house with foil backed insulation, aluminum siding and screened windows. Turns out it's an irregular shaped Faraday's cage. I have trouble getting reception indoors and I had to instal signal boosters to get my wireless LAN to work.
G
I loved my little LG dumb phone, it was so easy to use and I could take pix and send them via text, I could really do a lot with it. But I couldn’t get email, so I finally had to get a smart phone.
As do I and Mrs. OldPossum. Our phones are never turned on until needed and by that we mean an emergency such as the car breaking down on the road.
I have a dumb (flip) phone and I love it. I am thinking about getting another one and putting it away for the day my current phone dies or I lose it. My flip phone does everything I want a phone to do.
Another Luddite rant against those danged new-fangled contraptions that confuse and confound our old-man brains, pickled by decades of watching David Brinkley give the evening news while sitting in our recliners in our wife-beater t-shirts with a cold can of Pabst Blue Ribbon brought to us by our cringing doormat of a wife.
By the way, what would Archie Bunker think if the Meathead sauntered into his living room toting an iPhone 5 with Facebook and Twitter apps? That would make for an interesting 21 minutes (after commercials) of television back in 1972.
Gee, what sort of troglodyte would not own one of these wonders and stay "connected" 24/7? I have the cheapest phone I could get for emergencies. The thing can take pictures, but there is no way to send them anywhere as far as I can tell.
I have to say, the twits frantically texting or whatever it is, while ignoring their date/companion do give me great laughs. As if I need yet another reason to have contempt for gen-x/y/z - whatever.
My wife and I have two tracphones that we’re able to maintain with minutes for $18/month, with me purchasing additional minutes once or perhaps twice a year. Probably under $300 for the whole year for two phones.
I absolutely cringe when I dig into plans for smart phones. Minumum two year contract, 79 -90 per month. EACH. OUCH. Close to $2,000 for us? Versus $300? Easy peasy choice. I’m amazed how all these broke people are so addicted to their smart phones they cannot leave them home. One guy I work with left his at home and was almost all the way to work and turned around to go home and get it. He was 40 or so minutes late for work.
That being said, every year we look into smart phones because I’m always having to call home to have my wife look up the weather for me, simple internet things like that. So we’re looking at the Walmart family whatever plan with NO contracts, and about $40/month per phone. I’m thinking if they can do it, all the other carriers COULD do it, but refuse. This would be half price, so about $1,000 per year for two phones. Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll see. Still a lot of money.
Our home phone is all internet now, so we’ve saved enough for one of these Walmart plan phones, and we don’t have cable so I actually COULD afford them... The tightwad in me wins often, and I hate being tied to any contract.
“What happens if the power goes out and the screens all go black?”
There would be millions of people putting down their mobile idiot boxes, looking at the person they are with and asking, “Who are you?”
So, you could steal their women, and they'd not notice for a while. What's not to like?
I too am a dumb phone aficionado.
I had one of the original “bag phones”. Big and bulky, far too big to carry in a pocket or holster - had to carry it in your hand. We normally left it in the car, but in December of 1989 my wife was approximately 9 months pregnant with our first child. I had to go on a “leadership retreat” for my job - one of those things where management manipulates the professional staff to conclude that we need to do exactly what the boss thought best for the coming year. Boring as heck. I carried my fancy cell phone prominently wherever I went, and when things got really boring I would tap out our home number and then hang up. This was the signal for my wife to call me. I would rush out of the room yelling “This could be it!” and head home, only to come back the next day and tell them about the false alarm.
I am far too cheap to pay the monthly data charge for a smart phone. I figure I can wait till I get home or back to my desk to check email or look something up through google. Needing a smart phone to get directions or find a restaurant when I’m out is simply evidence of poor planning. Not saying it’s totally useless - I have been in situations where it would have been nice to have it, but it’s not worth the cost to me.
Two problems:
1) the women are also engrossed in their idiot phones.
2) I am not attracted to piercings, stretched out earlobes and the other "enhancements" that gen-x/y/x - whatever chicks seem to be so enamored of.
I find it personally sickening to go to a restaurant and see tables of 3-5 people sitting there, phones in hand. Instead of congenial conversation among themselves (I presume that WAS the purpose of meeting in the restaurant for a meal...), these yuks are busy checking their calls, playing games, taking pics, or even talking on the phone during the meal. They look like a bunch of morons to the casual observer. They are utterly addicted to the phones and the various utilities thereof.
When I watch a DVD, I find it horrifying to see how many ways a person can connect to "the cloud" so that they could watch their movie on their PC, phone,TV, or speedometer. Just when, I cannot help but think, are they scheduled to have actual doings with HUMANS?
I find it personally sickening to go to a restaurant and see tables of 3-5 people sitting there, phones in hand. Instead of congenial conversation among themselves (I presume that WAS the purpose of meeting in the restaurant for a meal...), these yuks are busy checking their calls, playing games, taking pics, or even talking on the phone during the meal. They look like a bunch of morons to the casual observer. They are utterly addicted to the phones and the various utilities thereof.
When I watch a DVD, I find it horrifying to see how many ways a person can connect to "the cloud" so that they could watch their movie on their PC, phone,TV, or speedometer. Just when, I cannot help but think, are they scheduled to have actual doings with HUMANS?
The same as people who don't own a tv and have an overwhelming compulsion to tell others of that fact.
My college age niece is dating a young Marine. We had dinner with them recently, and I questioned him carefully on the subject of map reading. While he is on top of it, he has had NCO superiors who were not.
Yeah, it’s a great little phone, mine cost $35- with a pre-pay plan.
And even my ex-boss (an attorney!) who had to have Verizon because in the NYC area it was the only good service, but who really wanted i-phone capability, got himself and i-pod and had that same little lg phone, this is a guy who basically earns most of his money based on talking on the phone.
My MetroPCS phone costs me $50 per month with no contract. It would be $10 less if I were willing to tolerate slower speed for most of the month. I opted for the 2.5 gig plan and use about 2 gig per month. My simple LG phone was under $150 (a promo price) and it’s still going strong after almost two years.
A cell phone is like any other tool. Some people need one, some people don’t. Some people need a simple version; some need one with bells and whistles. Some people want a tool with more capability than they really need.
As one poster said, you can own the phone, or the phone can own you. Most people who are addicted to their phones would be addicted to something else if you took the phone away. So do you use it for your needs or are you addicted?
I love having a smart phone and some of its apps, even some that I don’t use. I use my electric drill only a few times a year, but when I need it, I’m glad I have it. Same with some apps. Other people might use their electric drill every day. Different needs. I have a fire extinguisher I’ve never used, but I’m glad I have it, just in case. Same with some of my phone apps. I’m not saying you should have a smart phone or any phone at all. Do what works for you. I’m just saying this is what works for me.
As far as ignoring people, you can choose to do that or not. And you can choose to spend time with people who ignore you in favor of their phone or you can find friends who are there with you in the moment.
Last night I had dinner in a restaurant with about a dozen other people. The adults ranged in age from early 20s to late 50s. Lively conversation and yes, there was one cell phone out that I remember. The 30-something parents gave it to their 1-year-old to amuse him. So yes, it is possible to find friends who look you in the eye and talk to you instead of texting.
I suspect a lot of the email/text addiction is due to the fear of missing out on something, or the possibility of something better than what they have at the moment. What those people don’t realize is that they are missing out on real life happening around them right now.
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