<h2>Curse of the Cell Phone</h2>

Cell phones have ruined American society.

The present era has a whole different appearance from all previous ones. Everywhere you go today—and I do mean everywhere—you encounter people holding this little device to their ear and talking away, frequently walking about, discussing personal matters, oblivious to people around them, and usually talking loud.

I didn’t appreciate the society we had before the appearance of that irksome gadget, but now I look back on the pre-cell-phone era as a virtual golden age of good manners and civility. People were normal then. They talked only with other visible people, like themselves. The exception was when they were in their home or office talking on a landline telephone, and that too was normal.

In recent centuries, human life has been transformed by the automobile, the airplane, the computer, and other inventions, but I believe the cell phone leads the way in being the most intrusive device to appear. It has invaded the very soul of America. You just can't get away from the bloody thing, or the atrocious manners it seems to engender.

Recently I made my monthly visit to a small barbershop, where I witnessed something that wouldn’t have been believed a few years ago. I noticed that one barber had white hair and a white beard and so did his customer. About halfway through the haircut, the customer accepted a cell-phone call and started yaking away. The barber, unable to continue cutting the man’s hair, was forced to pace back and forth across the shop for 15 minutes till the conversation ended.

The cell phone has become the new deity: The God That Must Be Obeyed. I don’t care if your mother is being chased by wild dogs. You must answer that jingling cell phone. And don’t be in a rush to hang up, either. Your mother will survive—with lots of stitches. Furthermore, you may be rewarded by being wafted away into another world via that phone. Recently in a supermarket I heard loud laughter and looking toward the sound, saw a well-dressed young woman in a checkout lane. She was alternately talking and laughing into her cell phone, and her volume was increasing. The cashier was finishing up scanning her groceries and there were people all around, but the young woman was drifting onto another plane of existence.

Whatever she was hearing on that cell phone reached new heights of hilarity and she started JUMPING UP AND DOWN, three or four inches off the floor, and shrieking with laughter. People were staring at her, but she was oblivious to them and her surroundings. I wonder if she realized later what an appalling spectacle she had made of herself.

According to a national survey ,a majority of American adults (30%) say the cell phone is the invention they hate the most—but can't live without. The cell phone beat out the alarm clock (25%) and television (23%). The survey measures Americans’ attitudes toward invention. Merton Flemings, survey director, said that although cell phones have “clearly been beneficial,” the benefits of an invention “sometimes come with a societal cost.”

I suppose that’s what they call that young woman jumping up and down and screaming in a supermarket: a “societal cost.” Not to mention the customer who interrupted a haircut for 15 minutes to chat on his cell.

I think the main force responsible for the success of the cell phone is a human weakness: the dread of being alone. Some people need to be connected to other people all the time. Years ago I worked with a woman named Carol who told me that she wished she never had to be alone for as much as two seconds of her life. She said she would take somebody to the bathroom with her if she could.

It’s hard for me to understand such an attitude. I enjoy being with people some of the time, but I also like being alone, and silent, and I marvel at those men and women I see chattering away on cell phones as they shop in stores, drive cars, and even walk their dogs. Yak yak yak yak yak. The cell phone has given new life and acceptance to loquacity. It hasn’t been that hard on garrulity either.

I know that the need to connect isn’t the only lure of cell phones and I don’t doubt that business and other matters are discussed on them. But a majority of the conversations I have listened to (against my will) have consisted of chatting or an earnest discussion of personal problems that should not be discussed within earshot of a stranger. And I think the need to do that is what primarily drives the cell-phone industry.

Some pretty cool research into cell-phone use has been going on and you can read here about researchers who discovered that hearing one half of a conversation is more annoying than hearing two people converse normally.

Cell phones provide voice mail, giving the owner the option of ignoring the ring if circumstances are inappropriate for starting a conversation. Yet not once have I seen a cell-phone user let the voice mail pick up. They always take the call, no matter how many other people may be inconvenienced or annoyed.

Once in a while I have noticed a well-mannered person accept a call, then hurriedly walk away to a location where they can speak in private. But these polite folks are in a small minority. Most cell-phone freaks think nothing of carrying on a lengthy conversation even while they are in a movie theater.

A lot of people complain about cell-phone annoyances, but I haven't noticed anybody viewing this phenomenon as I do: a historic shift in the manners and mores of our society. The cell phone has produced a tacky new world that we never expected, and now can never be free of.

Before dawn on July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was exploded in a test near Alamogordo, New Mexico. First came the colossal blast, then the yellow fireball, and finally the now well-known mushroom cloud rising 7.5 miles into the sky. At that moment a line was crossed. Everything had changed, a new world had come into being, the Nuclear Age, and the old world was gone forever.

Physicist Kenneth Bainbridge, test director, watching the awesome spectacle from a distance with other scientists and military men, said grimly, “Now we’re all sons of bitches.”

Another line was crossed on April 3, 1973, when Martin Cooper, inventor of the cell phone, made the first call on the new device.

I was wondering if Cooper called himself a son-of-a-bitch for inventing the cell phone, but he didn’t. He was quite happy and buoyant about it, and to give him credit, it was an admirable achievement from a strictly scientific viewpoint.

“As I walked down the street while talking on the phone, sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call,” said Cooper, who was with Motorola when he invented the cell phone and is now chairman and CEO of ArrayComm Inc. “Remember that in 1973, there weren't cordless telephones, let alone cellular phones.”

The phone that Cooper wowed New Yorkers with that day was a big, clunky thing weighing almost two pounds and costing several thousand dollars. It took many years for it to evolve into the sleek little inexpensive device in use today.

“People want to talk to other people—not a house, or an office, or a car,” Cooper said. “Given a choice, people will demand the freedom to communicate wherever they are, unfettered by the infamous copper wire. It is that freedom we sought to vividly demonstrate in 1973.”

Cooper got that right. People certainly do “demand the freedom to communicate wherever they are,” and with a vengeance. And though we complain about cell phones, we have to have them—don’t we?—because they make us safe. We can call for help when we're in trouble and no landline phones are available.

But wait—it turns out it’s not as simple as all that—there are lots of problems with emergency calls using a cell phone.

As this 2008 article explains,“If you call for help from a cell phone, dispatch centers can't guarantee they'll find you fast, or find you at all.” So we don’t even have guaranteed security to compensate us for the breakdown of manners and the endless babble of alien voices.

I am not equating the cell phone with the atomic bomb, and I am certainly not calling Martin Cooper a son of a bitch. What I am doing is equating one line with another line—call them lines of destiny—which once crossed, there is no going back to what existed before. You can’t get the toothpaste back into the tube or the genii back into the magic lantern. The nuclear bomb, offspring of the atomic variety, hangs over us still and the cell phone proliferates, even as we watch—and try not to listen.