Anywhere But Here: More Connected, But More Alone
Cellular telephones are so ever-present now that we somehow no longer bother about them or register the profound changes they have wrought in our culture and our behavior. After all, we’ve all had telephones forever. The cell phone is just a ready-to-trot wireless version, a gadget of the utmost convenience. So what’s the big deal?
The big deal is that the cellular phone has completely changed the way we behave in public and, even more, completely blurred the line between the public sphere and the private without us even realizing it, with wide-reaching implications for how we treat each other--and ourselves. The technology got ahead of any etiquette, any sense we might have had of public decorum, so that we no longer blanch when we overhear people confiding in, yelling at or cooing in the ear of someone else through their cell phones.
We’ve become a nation of compulsive communicators, nonstop babblers airing our most private thoughts in the most public of places--an airport lounge, a restaurant banquette, a city street.
We’re now all part of each other’s audiences. It’s as if we live in a virtual-reality TV talk show, a rolling 12-step public marathon, with complete strangers spewing out intimacies or fighting right in front of us, needful of the validation of our attention. It’s as if nothing is real anymore unless it happens in public with an audience, and the cellular phone is the perfect little gizmo to make this possible.
You don’t have to wangle your way onto Jerry or Oprah, or any of the other confessional TV shows. All you need is a public place and a cellular telephone, and you can be center stage, living one of your life’s little or big dramas out loud for all the rest of us to overhear. Look at me, the caller says. I’m somebody. I can’t even wait to get back to the office or to a pay phone. I have to make this call right now. I am needed. I am important. Just listen. My friends love me. My kids need me. My boss can’t breathe without me. I matter.
In fairness, this isn’t just an American addiction. Many of us have had the experience of being in a hillside town in Tuscany or an idyllic, isolated resort and being privy to the same techno-din. In fact, when I was last in Europe, the cellular-phone epidemic seemed even worse than here--all manner of coifed matrons and hip Eurokids strolling down the street barking into their portable phones over the roar of motorbikes.
What’s wrong with all of us? Why the desperate need to be vocally tethered to someone else at all times? Can we not stand the downtime, the silence of our own company? Even children are wired up, toting their own phones and beepers, overscheduled to the max--this play date, that soccer game--so that they, too, will learn to be strangers to themselves, unused to stillness, unaware that there is, or should be, a demarcation between public and private. Only in private do we take the measure of our own gifts and failings--no doubt why we avoid it so. Only in private--away from the crowd and the audience--do we do original and creative work and plumb the depths of our consciences. Only in private do we experience the truest and deepest emotions, be they agony or ecstasy.
The rest is posturing: Life as a spectator sport, precisely what we’ve turned sex into. The accent is no longer on the act itself but on the postcoital play-by-play. Like the tabloid TV shows, the postmodern sitcom is often little else but a titillating talkathon in which groups of friends sit around and dissect their sexual encounters for each other. They cannibalize their meaningful experiences and turn them into cheap anecdotes to be served up on a platter to the rest of their clique.
Cell phones have sped up that process. Jump out of bed and jump on the phone. Guess what I did; guess what he did. These phones have changed the very nature of gossip; they’ve made it quicker, crueler, more pervasive and instantaneous. There is no time to edit, pull back, savor. Everything is fodder, fair game, grist for the cell-phone mill.
All to say that we seem to have given up on privacy altogether--on the very idea of its virtues. It’s as if the entire 20th century has been about this technologically abetted trend away from privacy, so that we now arrive at a point where nothing is off-limits for public confiding, and where you cannot or need not be alone anywhere. In a car, in a forest, you’re reachable and so is your circle of friends. (Friends are the families of the ‘90s.) You’re not alone as long as you have your phone tucked in your purse or pocket, your cellular hedge against loneliness.
No doubt, that’s what the phones are ultimately about: loneliness and a frantic attempt to evade it. But the irony is that they make it worse. Think of it: You’re walking down a throbbing city street, noise and people all around, human pageantry, but you’re busy chatting with a friend or arguing with a spouse via your speed dial. You’re cocooned, disconnected from the things and people around you, experiencing that weird nonintimate-intimacy, that weird public-privacy that characterizes so many of our modern interactions, be they via the cellular phone or the Internet. It’s not unusual these days to see two people having lunch, forks in hand, talking not to each other but to someone else via their respective cell phones. Clearly we’re more hooked up than ever and, on some level, more lonesome. Why else all the manic phoning, the need to be reachable by somebody, anybody, anywhere and everywhere?
There’s a little grandiosity in it, too, a sense of self-importance conferred by a ringing phone. Excuse me, somebody needs me right now, this minute. But are any of us that important? Sure, we all have deadlines, personal and professional, but barely a one of us is so vital to some enterprise that the call has to be made this second, in public, no matter where you are or what the circumstances. That’s just self-congratulatory folderol. Kids, too, can wait. They don’t have to be phoned or fetched at a given instant. After all, we did all get along before we had these things. They provide a false sense of urgency, of faux drama, of life lived to the fullest.
By any measure, cell phones waste more time than they save, like many of our other so-called “timesaving devices.” They embroil us in endless, unnecessary chatter that only serves to abbreviate our already overstimulated attention spans.
Yes, there are true emergencies--on the road, in an accident, in a faltering democracy where a coup is imminent. Then a cellular phone can be a lifeline. But that’s not what most people are using them for on a daily basis. They’re using them to ward off the stillness, the demons, the specter of loneliness. Millions of people around the globe, walking down a jam-packed city street or sunbathing on a beach or lying in bed with a lover, reaching for their cell phones at this very moment, connecting up while simultaneously disconnecting from the time and place and pleasure at hand.
It’s a loud, lonesome tableau that speaks to the profound revolution these simple, hand-held devices have brought about in all our lives.
