Tiny Metal Shackles
Jun. 8th, 2004 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyspriteI find it completely and utterly wrong, in both a moral and a physical sense, that a teeny piece of metal and plastic no bigger than three of my fingers together has more computing power than the desk-sized Atari I played with in elementary school (and runs more complex games), and is quite possibly smarter than I am.
Yes, I have finally bowed down to social pressure and acquired a cell phone. I feel a deep sense of shame for doing this - I'm nowhere near important enough that people need to reach me at all times, and it feels incredibly vain and arrogant to assume that I'm cool enough to need it; and completely aside from that I just have a deep aversion to needless costs and needless gizmos. I've had a cell phone before, true, but that was mandated by school and entirely against my will, so I could feel morally sound while still benefiting from it. But I've run into enough situations recently where it would have been helpful that I decided to give in.
So my sweetie and I did some research, and wandered down to the mall yesterday. It would be easy, I figured. It's a phone, how complex can it be? I have a phone on the floor next to me right now - it's simple, it's plastic, it recieves calls and makes calls. It has buttons with numbers. The really complex ones have an answering machine thingummy.
Cell phones are not like this. Cell phones, in fact, are as far as I can tell no longer recognizable as phones. They check your email, speak multiple languages, play video games, sing the Fraggle Rock theme song, tell your children bedtime stories, and occasionally beam alien messages directly into your pineal gland with their tiny "non-functional" antennae. The user manual for my no-frills, bottom-of-the-line, no-camera, no-text, no-toaster-oven phone is thicker than my anesthesiology textbook. That just strikes me as imbalanced, somehow.
It's tiny. It's silver. It's adorable. And it's far more disturbing than any communication device should be. If I ever make it through the maze of menus and video clips and scavenger hunts to find out what the number is, I promise I'll let people know. I don't make any promises about figuring out how to answer it if you call me, though.....
Yes, I have finally bowed down to social pressure and acquired a cell phone. I feel a deep sense of shame for doing this - I'm nowhere near important enough that people need to reach me at all times, and it feels incredibly vain and arrogant to assume that I'm cool enough to need it; and completely aside from that I just have a deep aversion to needless costs and needless gizmos. I've had a cell phone before, true, but that was mandated by school and entirely against my will, so I could feel morally sound while still benefiting from it. But I've run into enough situations recently where it would have been helpful that I decided to give in.
So my sweetie and I did some research, and wandered down to the mall yesterday. It would be easy, I figured. It's a phone, how complex can it be? I have a phone on the floor next to me right now - it's simple, it's plastic, it recieves calls and makes calls. It has buttons with numbers. The really complex ones have an answering machine thingummy.
Cell phones are not like this. Cell phones, in fact, are as far as I can tell no longer recognizable as phones. They check your email, speak multiple languages, play video games, sing the Fraggle Rock theme song, tell your children bedtime stories, and occasionally beam alien messages directly into your pineal gland with their tiny "non-functional" antennae. The user manual for my no-frills, bottom-of-the-line, no-camera, no-text, no-toaster-oven phone is thicker than my anesthesiology textbook. That just strikes me as imbalanced, somehow.
It's tiny. It's silver. It's adorable. And it's far more disturbing than any communication device should be. If I ever make it through the maze of menus and video clips and scavenger hunts to find out what the number is, I promise I'll let people know. I don't make any promises about figuring out how to answer it if you call me, though.....
