I admit it: at one point in my life, I mocked those who had cell phones. I thought that having one was the height of self-importance, a smug signifier to the rest of the world that you were so important that you must be reachable at all times. And who, when it came right down to it, was really that important? What was the big deal with waiting until you return home, or to your office, to make and receive phone calls? What indignity was there in making a call from a public phone, if need be?
And then, a little more than five years, I gave in to the inexorable tide of progress and got one. And it quickly transformed me, in many ways. My former thinking about cell phones seems quaint, like the bumpkin who didn't see the use in indoor plumbing, and thought the outhouse was just fine. If I forget my cell phone at home, I feel lost, with a mild sense of panic permeating everything: what if someone's trying to call me?
This weekend, I got a new cell phone, the fourth since my first, which looks completely massive and archaic compared to this one. On this occasion, I've started thinking about the role of the cell phone in my life, and this one thought about it troubled me more than any other -- do I really need one more now than I did then?
It made me think more about the role technology in general has in our life. We want to believe that it solves some problem in your life, and in a sense, it does. I'm no Luddite. But my feeling, my suspicion, is that it creates new needs that it solves for you. In a sense, I do need my cell phone. But I didn't before I had one, and before my mindset was changed from "Oh well, my answering machine will just get whatever calls I miss while I'm out" to "I'd better take my cell phone in case someone calls."
That is, my need to get calls at all time, which my cell phone solves, was created by the fact that I got a cell phone.
I don't advocate a return to a hunter/gatherer existence, mostly because I can't hunt worth a damn, and if I was sent out to gather, I'd probably end up bringing back death's head mushrooms for dinner. But I do worry that we are being led into traps. Technology is seductive; it whispers to you of solving problems you never knew you had. And maybe it creates those problems it saves for you.
