Withdrawing Into Our Cells

Wireless technology has made it easier than ever to learn more about a perfect stranger’s life. The task isn’t accomplished through computer wizardry or high-tech listening devices. It’s nothing illegal, nothing inappropriate--at least on your part. Nope. All you have to do is to walk around in the 21st century in any industrialized nation in the world and listen for “cell yell.”

The condition afflicts cell phone users and can strike anywhere, any time, but mostly seems to overcome people in crowded public places such as restaurants, public transport and even the workplace. Under its sway, the caller will speak in a voice at twice, maybe triple, the volume of a normal conversation. And the things they talk about! Bounced checks, strange rashes, lovers’ spats.

Cell yell is just one of the many unanticipated consequences of a cell phone planet. Its massive electronic tentacles are influencing more than just our relationship with others, though it is doing precisely that, but it’s also changing our personal behavior in broad and subtle ways never envisioned.

And more than anything, we are discovering just how far and wide mind and body can be separated--because now we can be where we aren’t, no matter where we are.

“What it’s done is to change our view of reality,” asserts John Petersen, founder and president of the Arlington Institute, a future-oriented think thank in Arlington, Va. “You remember not so long ago when making a long-distance phone call was a big deal? You’d say, ‘I’m calling long distance,’ and you were supposed to drop everything? Now it’s not a big deal anymore to get a call from anywhere on the globe.”

More change is certainly on the way. Within five years, futurists predict cell phones will continue to shrink in size but expand in capability. The hand-held device will not only be able to make phone calls but will also function as a computer and perhaps even as a television. From there, they say, who knows--but don’t rule out the possibility of a communications chip implanted in the body.

But even now the world is a much smaller place because of the ubiquity of the cell phone. In the United States, among the slowest of the industrialized nations to adopt the cell phone, nearly two in three, or about 137 million, people use the device.

Little more than a decade ago, market studies by telecommunications companies indicated that, at best, cell phone users in America would top out at 3 million, according to Michael Zey, a sociologist at Montclair State University in New Jersey. At first, people claimed to value their privacy too much to have it interrupted without warning by a cell phone, according to Zey.

“Focus groups said, ‘I would never accept a cell phone in my car because it’s one of the few private places where the boss, my spouse, my kids can’t reach me,’ ” Zey said. “Well, that changed.”

In the workplace, cell phones are the latest tech tool to blur the line between office and home. The cell phone--some call it an electronic leash--has made it easier than ever for a boss to reach a worker any time, anywhere with the tacit understanding that there are few viable excuses for missing the call.

The cell phone even eliminated the few precious minutes of mental preparation time provided by its predecessor, the pager. Now, when the cell phone rings, the worker has only seconds to collect his or her thoughts and recognize the caller, then answer. The result is that many workers feel pressure to be on call 24/7.

“The expectation because of this technology is: Now I have to know what my boss is thinking before I get to work,” Zey said. “The workday never ends.”

Cell phone users can also face stiff challenges in focusing on the conversation. On a land line, callers are usually in familiar surroundings and thus less distracted by their environment and can more easily concentrate. With a cell phone, however, caller and receiver can easily miss an important detail as they multitask their way through traffic, a grocery store or the disapproving stares of fellow restaurant patrons.

Leaving even more room for miscommunication are newer cell phones with the capability of sending and receiving e-mails. “We always had bosses who had difficulty writing a memo,” Zey said. “Well, multiply that by 1,000 times.”

In the workplace, cell phones have created other unexpected problems among co-workers, especially in offices with closely spaced desks and cubicles.

For some workers, the office phone isn’t enough--they need a private, personal line. Thus cell phones have begun creeping into the workplace, and there’s no doubt the calls aren’t all business or even for legitimate personal business.

“One of the main reasons it gets under people’s skin is that when people talk on a cell phone, it’s as if everyone around them ceases to exist, and that’s very insulting,” said Carol Page, a Boston public relations consultant and founder of CellManners.com. “Also, I think people just can’t stand to overhear inane personal conversations.”

As some cities and states have banned cell phone use in cars and restaurants, some are talking about similar restrictions in the workplace. With the annoying rings, loud conversations and the fact that the worker is usually sitting by an office phone, it may not be long until cell phone users join smokers outside--where the reception would be better anyway.

Page, whose Web site promotes civility between cell phone users and those around them, said banning cell phones at work isn’t necessary. Workers should put their phones on vibrate and take personal calls away from their desks if they are within earshot of others.

Cell phones are also reshaping our social habits and attitudes, say sociologists. The portable phones, depending on their usage, can by turns be a shield against loneliness or create isolation. At one end of a restaurant, a patron dining alone places his or her order, then dials a friend--alone but not alone. At the other end of the restaurant, a cell phone conversation interrupts a face-to-face dinner conversation--leaving one party dining alone.

It’s easy to see similar dynamics at parties. On the one hand, a cell phone can help make a party all the merrier by easily summoning other partyers to the scene. On the other, a cell phone can discourage users from reaching out to other party guests. Where once they would have been forced by circumstance to strike up a conversation, cell phones now provide a socially acceptable way to be at the party ... but not.

“They can reduce the need to create bridges,” Zey said. “It allows people to exclude the people who may be in front of them and to interact with people they already know who are someplace else.”

Cell phones have also encouraged a sudden urgency to connect with friends and family with little regard to the content of the conversation. Cell phone conversations, as anyone who has ridden public transportation, walked through a shopping mall or been to the beach can attest, are usually not about much. A recent three-panel cartoon in the New Yorker jokes around with some cell phone users’ apparent need to always be on the phone. The first panel shows a businessman entering a train talking on a cell phone with the caption, “I’m boarding the train.” In the next, which shows the man on the train, he says, “I’m on the train.” And in the last one, showing the cell phone user leaving, he says: “I’m leaving the train.”

“I think people have become more dependent on being in constant touch with others,” said Edward Tenner, author of the 1997 book “Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences.” “If you’re not always accessible, people get anxious.”

So where are cell phones taking us, and what may be next?

Within the next five years, the much-talked-about idea of “convergence” will probably transform today’s cell phones into one super machine. In addition to phone capabilities, the device will also have e-mail, computer and video abilities. It may take five years after that, says Petersen, for the price of the all-in-one device to come down enough for widespread usage.

“Cell phones and what is coming is what is driving globalization,” says Petersen, a former staff member of the National Security Council at the Reagan White House. “I think what we’re seeing is an almost biological evolution of the species. I think we’re building a global nervous system and brain.”

And if that happens, perhaps we won’t have to put up with cell yell anymore.