I don't mean to sound curmudgeonly, but I'm a little bit touchy about this subject. The first time I ever saw a cellphone was on a horrific television program called "Saved By The Bell". The show centered around a group of narcissistic and affluent suburban high school students confronting a new nauseatingly watered-down and parent-friendly version of a typical teenage issue each episode. Just when it would begin to look like the group's pet geek wouldn't be able to buff the scratch out of dad's Hummer in time for the Spring Formal, Zack (the consummate product of Germany's top secret eugenics program during WW2 and defacto group leader) would whip out his tissue-box sized cellphone and make a call, saving the day with his astounding powers of. . . . speed dialing?
When this program was originally aired in 1989 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096694/), kids who were merely rich had pagers clipped to the waistbands of their $100 Guess jeans. People with mobile phones were either CIA agents, cocaine entrepreneurs, or hotel heiresses. I remember seeing the show and immediately thinking about Richie Rich, the gazillionaire cartoon protagonist who taught Regan-era children that if you throw enough money at any problem, it will go away. Zack and his cellphone were representative of everything wrong with post-Sesame Street America. Richie Rich had won, and in winning was reborn more powerful than ever in the form of Zack. Banjo playing frogs who sang soulfully about the hardships of being green gave way to purple dinosaurs droning about citizenship to an endlessly looping backdrop of patriotic marching music. George H.W. Bush gleefully danced atop Buckminster Fuller's grave like a madman, his malevolent eyes gleaming in the gathering darkness.
That being said, my spouse du jour bought me a cellphone in 1999. After a day of acquainting myself with what a sea-otter must feel like after being radio-tagged by National Geographic, I threw the vile device in the garbage. I tried again two years ago; texting had become fashionable and seemed like a less invasive method of having nowhere to hide. But after losing three phones (and replacing two of them) in the space of three months, I realized that like Tom Bombadil when faced with Sauron's abominable ring, the phone simply had no power over me--I could never care about one enough to be trusted to keep track of it.
A few weeks ago, a couple of girls outside of Faculty Hall--cellphones in hand--were lamenting how annoying it was that people wouldn't stop calling them. It had been a long and arduous day and I was unable to stop myself from pointing out that they could always just turn the devices off. The loudest complainant retorted that she had a sick relative, and as such was obliged to be constantly available.
It isn't that I am unsympathetic to an illness in the family (nor am a blind to the fact that a cellphone would have handily saved me a 2 mile walk home from Library Orientation two weeks ago), but when I suggested that I could remember when humanity managed to survive (however crudely) seemingly unimpeded before the advent of cellphones, they looked at me as though I were speaking Aramaic.
Now we have Smart Phones, and up til this moment I have been able to say with pride that I have no idea what one is, or what makes it so smart.
Apple (http://www.apple.com/iphone/?cid=wwa-naus-seg-iphone10-024&cp=www-seg-iphone10-smartphones&sr=sem) tells me that with an "iphone4", I can pretend like I'm Jadzea Dax Bantering from a shuttle-craft with Captain Sisko on the bridge of DeepSpace9--as tempting as that is, face to face real-time videophone conversations seem like an extension of the ever elaborate ruse that causes people to ignore what is in front of them in favor of what is not.
The phone also offers something called a "retina display", which is apparently an ultra-scientific way of saying "real sharp picture". If you were wondering why it is important (or maybe it was just me) for your telephone to display pictures in which pixels are impossibly small, the helpful demonstration picture (http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/retina-display.html) suggests that it is so you won't feel like you got ripped off when you are inspecting your display window for microscopic flaws with a powerful magnifying glass.
The next heading reads: "Multitasking. Give everything your undivided attention" followed by an explanation of how iphone4 allows users to divide their attention between several applications at once, which is just silly.
With iphone4's HD recording feature, a user need never actually be engaged in anything again! Unburdened of her life while it is going on, she can concern herself with recording it in high definition so that she may nostalgically relive events for which she was never fully present through a quasi-real digital filter.
I can't go on, it's making me sick--suffice to say that with iphone4's highspeed internet access, GPS mapping, television, video game, and music storage/streaming capabilities, no one will ever actually have learn anything, know anything, go anywhere, or experience anything firsthand ever again.
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