Just Another Pod Person

Does it seem to you like mankind as a whole is achieving new highs in interpersonal communication? After all, there are innumerable books on the subject. Incidentally, if you’re looking for one, check out Deborah Tannen. Her book, You Just Don’t Understand, is the best one I ever read. Another good one that addresses both verbal and nonverbal communication in marriage is Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages.

Surely we’ve been brought closer together by e-mail, right? You can send your thoughts to someone halfway across the world, instantaneously. In fact, you can even send the same thoughts to dozens of people at the same time, and nothing says “personal relationship” quite like that. I find I hear from a slew of people every week… there’s a lovely fellow in Nigeria who’s made me a very generous offer if I can just help him with a little bank transfer problem he’s been having. And I do like to make new friends, but I continue to get mail from a large number of people that seem a little too interested in certain very personal aspects of my life and… well… person.

Still, I can’t quite shake the notion that there’s a whole lotta communicatin’ going on. I base that largely on the fact that virtually every one I know or see along my daily rounds has a cell phone. Actually, I left out part of that sentence: it should read, “has a cell phone surgically attached to his or her head”. Perhaps I’m not the best judge, since I have been known to put off making the most mundane phone call for multiple days. But do we really have this much to talk about?

When I leave the house, I almost never say to myself, “I wish I could make a phone call. I really need to talk to someone. I can’t wait to get to a phone!” But there certainly seem to be a number of urgent, can’t-wait conversations going on wherever you go. Note I didn’t say “top secret”; another wonderful virtue of cell phones is that they allow not only the two official parties to the call, but everyone else within a 20-foot radius, to stay in constant contact. It’s like being invited into someone’s living room, or perhaps their phone booth.

Not long ago I was driving past a downtown parking lot and saw not one but three young women in the pose we’ve become accustomed to seeing: standing about 15 feet apart, facing away from each other, motionless and slightly hunched. Not a scene from experimental theater, as it turned out.

Up until very recently, my indignation has been pure and unsullied. The problem is that we are in our second year of owning a camp, and while we spend as much time there as possible, it’s not enough to justify the expense of a phone. We’ve been depending for some time on the forbearance of our neighbor, but it seemed like a good idea to find a way to shift for ourselves; the barbed wire she put up along the property line is a bit unsightly.

So we bought the cheapest, simplest, most feature-free phone and coverage available, and the intent is to use it sparingly and for the most part to receive calls at camp. I hope we don’t turn out like the high school kids who plead for a cell “just so I can call home” (and end up talking all day to their friends sitting across the room), but I do have a vaguely uneasy feeling that we’ve joined Cell Phone Zombie Nation. So if you find me hunched over in a parking lot, you have my permission to drive a wooden stake through the heart of my phone.

Postscript I discovered through a bit of googling that I'm mixing up vampires and zombies:

• Vampire <=> stake through heart
• Zombie <=> destroy brain

So I guess I meant "destroy the brain of my cell phone" -- if it hasn't already done the same to me through a combination of deadly radiation and the general dumbification that seems to victimize many cell-users...