Cell phones: a reference for all those concerned.

When I was a little kid, I was walking down the street with my parents and I heard someone talking in Spanish. This set me to empathizing with the speaker. I had been studying French in school, and I knew how hard it was to think about what I wanted to say, then figure out what English words would fit best, then translate those words into another language. It’s tough, and this person was speaking a lot of words. Immediately following those thoughts I had my first revelation; of course she wasn’t translating English thoughts into Spanish. She was thinking in Spanish.
I’ve read that the human brain is wired to be able to speak and understand languages. The fact that we develop many different languages that can’t be perfectly cross-translated, I think, speaks to our collective inability to accurately communicate our ideas into words in a way that can be universally understood. Additionally the affiliation between thoughts and words is not the same from person to person and it is a loose affiliation indeed. I often feel like I have this loose affiliation even worse than the average person. This has lead to a lot of confusion or misunderstanding concerning my personal inhibition to acquiring a cell phone.
Many of those who are close to me know that I am very resistant to having a cell phone, and because they are friends and family, most of them have given me the benefit of the doubt and asked me why. This is a perfectly reasonable question that I have never been able to adequately answer. The kicker is that the conclusion is perfectly clear in my head: I don’t want a cell phone. My clarity and insistence in this matter combined with my inability to communicate the reasoning has had unfortunate consequences. I’ve been referred to as a luddite, a contrarian, and (most unjustly) as stubborn. This has been an on-going conversation for many years; but recently I have gotten a better hold on the reasons I don’t want a cell phone. Perhaps, with a bit of effective communication, I can make it as clear for all the people outside of my head too.

Some of the reasons I don’t want to have a cell phone, I have made clear to some people. These are the usual suspects in ascending importance:

Cell phones record more and more personal information, and I do not trust that it will be handled properly. I try to minimize the cross-section of my personal information that is available to companies that can profit by selling it. (This is a weak objection that I may give up some day.)

Cell phones are expensive; it is really a lot of money one way or the other. (This objection has been negated by generous people offering to buy a plan for me.)

Cell phones provide poor service. Coverage, and provider issues aside, the sound quality from a cell phone is universally poor. Even the best cell phones are only given a small portion of bandwidth for voice, and the result is tinny and abrasive sound quality that makes everyone hard to understand (for me) and afraid to talk over each other. (This unnecessary limitation clearly annoys me more than the average cell phone user.)

Cell phones are not necessary. They are incredibly convenient, and I would never deny that. No matter how ingrained they are in our daily/hourly lives, if the system crashed, we would survive. I can still make plans for the future without being able to talk to someone right now. In fact, I’ve learned this behavior is gratifying because of the extra effort it takes. (*Yes, of course I could make plans that don’t rely on the phone despite having a cell phone; see below.)

I do not want to be available all the time. As convenient as it would be for other people to be able to reach me in a moment’s notice, I don’t want to be reachable all the time. (*Yes, of course I could turn it off; see below.)

Cell phones are unnecessarily and intentionally wasteful. They draw far more energy from the grid than a 5V home phone, but that isn’t the real issue. Cell phones are made to be replaced. They are made to specs that are apparently engineered to fail after 2 years. Partly this is driven by consumer demand to replace old tech with new tech. But there is enough consumer demand for a phone that never breaks under normal use, that there should be at least one model available. There isn’t. Either they physically break after 2 years, or they are rendered useless by software upgrades, or the electronic components burn out. None of this is inevitable. Many houses contain (now defunct) hard-wired or wireless phones that have been operational for decades, mine included.

Cell phones are a distraction from real, present life. I do not want to be connected to people and information at all times. My brain is very active. I jump from thought to thought as I walk down any random street. It is how I live my life and experience the world. I solve my life problems and world problems, I invent cool stuff, I sing songs, I have philosophical debates, I notice other people and try to understand them, I talk to people I am with and try to reason through things I don’t know, I notice animals and sounds, I notice how I feel, and plan things I want to do and say. When I talk to people on the phone, most of that shuts down as I apply my attention to the person. (This isn’t intrinsically bad, but if it happens all the time, it will detract from what I am doing; this is why I am usually staring at the ceiling in a dark room during long phone conversations.) When I am connected to information, every question is followed by an answer from either a solid source of information or some collective of opinions. It is convenient, but intellectually stifling and boring. (If it is important and I am unconnected, I’ll look it up later.) (*Yes of course I could turn it off; see below.)

*People point it out all the time. You can have the convenience of a cell phone without access to the features you’d prefer not to use simply by turning off the features. If you don’t want to be connected, turn off the phone. If you don’t want access to limitless info, don’t use a data plan. If you don’t want to be accessible, buy a phone that is for emergency use only. There is no denying that this is true; but that is not what I would do. If I had the ability to talk to people any time, I would. If I had access to information all the time, I would use it instead of my brain. If I had music and video entertainment available, I would partake. Some of the reasons I don’t have a cell phone are the same reasons I don’t buy skittles and keep them in the house, the same reasons I don’t give myself access to cable or broadcast TV. When you have an issue with overindulgence of whatever, sometimes the best option is to limit your access to whatever in any way you think will work.



It seems that those explanations never suffice. People tend always to return with the same arguments, and it is these return arguments that I have only recently been able to address. They sound something like this:
What happens if you are in an accident?
What happens if you are lost?
What if you are running late or need assistance?
What if you are in danger?
What if other people you love are lost, hurt, in danger...?
and, most recently: Oh, you’ll get a cell phone when Ann is pregnant/about to give birth/when you have children.

My only response to date has been to cite the well-known fact that somehow the human race has survived to date, most of the time without cell phones. Unfortunately, this barely scratches the surface of the real reason that I have remained unswayed (and rather annoyed) by these arguments. Keeping to this inadequate answer sounds very much like an exercise in stubbornness because it sounds like I am denying that I would want a cell phone in those situations: an absurd proposition. In all but one and a third of the situations above, I would definitely want a cell phone... badly.

The real reason that I strongly resist those objections is because they are reasons based in and designed around fear. We live in a culture of fear. Our marketing drives consumerism with fear, our wars are driven and funded by fear, our laws are built to dispel fear, our politicians are elected because they claim to take actions to abate our fear. Bad things can happen, and the fact that they might happen should make you want to _______________. Fill in the blank: reduce our civil rights, buy a cell phone, make slingshots and lawn darts illegal, fight the taliban, elect another Bush, stop eating eggs, pass DOMA, refuse vaccinations, outlaw fresh milk, bomb Iran... I’ve seen people fight every single day to live their lives despite all of the bad things that could happen as a consequence, and I have seen people destroyed by fear. I will not decide how to live my life based on what I fear.

I’m not particularly ignorant though. Being prepared for the worst is not the same as being afraid of the worst. I won’t discount the possibility of something bad happening just because I don’t want to live in fear of it. Bad things might happen that would be easier to handle with a cell phone. But when you put aside the fear, those (mostly remote) possibilities become just another factor in the calculus of making the cell phone decision; and in that calculus, I still don’t want a cell phone.

Lastly, I don’t claim this to be irrefutable logic or an undeniable conclusion, but it is my logic and my conclusion. This is my reason; this is why I don’t want a cell phone. It’s not stubborn; I have nothing to prove to the people in my life who think I should have a cell phone. It’s not a decision made out of a dislike of technology or a desire to be contradictory. It is a reasoned decision in defiance of fear but accounting for all possibilities, and (I shudder to share this) it isn’t necessarily final. I am always open to more information, or shifting priorities; but as far as I can tell, this is how I want to live my life... I think.