Signal is Strength

An essay on how cell phones affect personal relationships.

    I was struck recently by a billboard for a cell phone provider and the message that it boasted. “Signal is Strength”. As if to say, “Without reception, you are powerless”. And this may in fact be true in a country where over almost all of the population uses cell phones. They are a ubiquitous part of our human experience, and are undeniably shaping our relationships.
    No longer does a parent have to worry or wonder why their child has missed a curfew: simply give them a ring to find out where they are. Forgot to grab the grocery list from your wife? Give her a call from the supermarket and find out if it’s the Light or Extra Light that she wanted. We can send jokes to each other, flash animations, keep in contact through email and instant messaging, scribble down impromptu notes or important dates, search the Internet, take photos, play games, even learn languages from these seemingly celestial devices. And with the expounding leaps in micro technology and processing chips, our personal cell phones are now our personal computers. In the wake of so many users of these devices, it’s no surprise that our most basic of social behaviors have been impacted by them.
    Our communications have been beguiled into flashes of fiber optic immediacy, trimming attention spans and turning the old proverb of Patience is a Virtue on its head. When I was a child, and felt like going out to play with a friend, the process was simple: walk up the street to his house, ring the bell to see if he was home, and ask if he wanted to go to the park. If he wasn’t there, I would just have to wait until he got back. Now, all that’s required is a simple text message, and whether he’s home or not my message will get to him. If I call, and perhaps he misses the muted ring tone, I can easily leave a message and let him know where I’ll be. And even if we can’t meet up, we can still carry on our conversations by messaging back and forth, without missing a thought.
    Intimacy(in a new digital form) is also emerging under liquid crystal displays, the bonds of a relationship sometimes held even tighter because of a cell phone. Asking for a date or revealing an admission of attraction(once a nerve-wracking, character building activity to perform in person) can now be accomplished through a few witty messages and punctuation emoticons. Keeping up with a significant other is only made easier when they can be reached anytime, and moments of affection need not be hoarded only for the moments when we are face to face. There seems to even be a pressure to perpetuate this constant wave of communication, if only to not seem disinterested.
    But what happens when these magical barriers break down, or work against us?
In public, in a group setting, one person simply taking a call can completely interrupt the social dynamic: Ask any teacher. Unwarranted conversations are overheard everyday, most mundane, some extreme, but all a bit of a nuisance for anyone not involved in the call. Stray bits of personal information are blurted out and left lingering in the heads of so many unknowns, that who knows how it could come back to haunt us later. We become angry and inconsolable when we lose reception(when we lose strength) and can‘t make or receive a call momentarily. We struggle through conversations that can be wrought with misunderstandings when certain words or phrases don’t make it to our end.  Or heaven forbid, if we actually forget to take our phone with us altogether, and have to live with the naked feeling that their may be updates we’re missing out on.
    All of this reliance can further take us away from the tangible, the actual precious musings of our daily lives that we so take for granted. Imagine if Newton hadn’t had time to ponder the falling apple hitting his head because he was too busy playing Tetris on his iPhone. The obsession with our phones, and indeed even the demand to have the newest, brightest, and most complex phones available can further distract us from the natural way and pace in which we learn about our world. Why bother reading a book when a synopsis can be pulled instantly from Wikipedia on your mobile browser? Why take the time, money, and effort to journey to the crumbling castles of Europe when slideshows can be sent directly to your phone from someone who’s already been? But these people can’t tell you the effect that Nabokov had on them through each sultry sentence. They can’t tell you that Bückeburg Palace in Northern Germany has a small chapel painted in gold leaf that smells like wood and roses. These kinds of palpable encounters help to shape who we are, how we see the world, and how we interact with each other, and mining one’s mobile phone for a quick answer can make experiencing the human condition less conducive.
    Whether used for convenience, learning, apathy, or boredom, our cell phones will continue to follow us around for a long time. So much to do with how a phone is used is dependant solely on the owner, and how they choose to spend their time with the machine. The responsibility still falls to the individual to make the choice to put it down, turn it off, and look around for a while. We can live in harmony with our cellular compatriots and even use them to enhance the way in which we live our lives, as long as we can maintain some sort of moderation, some semblance of the fact that these are not the end all pieces of plastic we must use to communicate with one another. We can snap photos at our parties, call to wish a happy birthday, or send a loving note to our loved ones when we are away. But we mustn’t forget how we started communicating in the first place: with our minds, and mouths, and bodies. And that in the end, there is no substitution for the connections that two individuals sharing the same space and time can have. We can keep our technology close, and even use it to help bring us closer together, as long as we don’t lose ourselves in digital dementia along the way.  
     But please, turn off your ringtones.