First cell phone
by Bob on August 12, 2007
Well, I finally succumbed. I bought a cell phone, a mobile phone, if you will. The first one in my life. I have resisted for the duration. Some friends over lunch convinced me, sort of, to get one. The worst kind of peer pressure possible.
These friends convinced me with the ultimate device, the price. It was quite cheap, which is what the sales people want. Give away free the razor, and you'll make a fortune in the refill blades. Gillette knew that. Give away the camera, and you'll make a fortune on the film which must be bought always. George Eastman knew that with his camera. Give away the phone and you'll make a fortune in the minutes the person uses on calls, regardless of plans. Every cell phone company knows that.
I am very unsettled about this phone. I look at it. I have been in Science and technology for over 40 years. I have been in Computer Science since the 1960s. But the phone is intimidating. It is like a simple radio or stereo set with a million buttons on the front. To me that is bad engineering design. Too many choices. Too confusing. Not visible to the naked eye at one glance which is a goal of elegant engineering design and human interface engineering.
I have stood in front of an IBM 360/91 supercomputer and was a programmer who wrote programming code for the Operating System, OS/360 back in the 1960s. The computer was as large as a ballroom, and the console of the machine was huge with a million switches and lights blinking. But I knew the machine well, and knew the guts of it and I was in control of it since I was writing Operating System deep internal programming code. So I was fearless. It was subjugated by me and my team.
But this cell phone daunts me in a rather peculiar way. I am uncomfortable with the hidden technology and the abundance of seemingly useless features. Oh, I read the big technical manual for it, so I know how to use it. But it doesn't feel comfortable, or in a human perspective.
Some people can't live without a cell phone. They have to be connected. I have my doubts about the quality of that kind of connection. And I don't mean the number of signal strength bars on the cellphone display ! I mean the quality of human-to-human connection and true meaningful communication rather than just blabber or gibberish.
Well I am looking at my new cell phone. I don't want to use it. I want to talk with people the old-fashioned way, in person, in vivo, in situ. But virtually no one will anymore.
Now I must feel like a neo-Luddite. Deja-vu all over again, as Yogi Berra said. A slippage in the time-space continuum, as Dr. Carl Jung said later.
It feels like an albatross around my neck. Like in the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner back in 1798. An encumbrance, a wearisome burden. Quoting from the poem:
Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
Or even remembering the Baudelaire poem, the Albatross, one of my favourites. Which views an albatross in a nicer way. Indolently following a ship at sea. Like blind profound love.
Sigh. I guess I'll play a soccer game on the cell phone.
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Postscript:
After writing this essay, I was on the train in Boston headed out of town and as I was standing there in the train car, I looked down at a "Boston Now" newspaper (8/13/2007), page 8, which a lady was reading. It was on a page which had a letter from a reader entitled "To Hell on a cell phone?" by Sandra Roberts. Amazing ! Ms. Roberts said partly:
"Despite all the great technological strides and advancements humans have made throughout the centuries, somehow we remain inexplicably stuck in our attitudes and behaviors."
"What I find most curious about our obvious disconnect from our fellow man is our hyper-attachment to the recent addition to the hi-tech family: the cell phone. This twenty-first-century appendage, created to ensure we remain connected 24/7, has done little or nothing to foster a warm, fuzzy spirit of brotherhood ..."
"All of the shiny, new trappings of the modern world have done little to tame the mercenary, selfish beasts within us. If anything, it has brought it to the surface with a vengeance."
"I can't help but to ask myself, as a society, have we evolved into a newer and improved version of who we were, say, twenty years ago?"
"Gee, I don't know. Have we?"
And who doesn't believe in Dr. Jung's Synchronicity ? It was a synchronistic event ! I had just finished writing this essay, got on the train, and see this article from today's paper being read by someone I am standing over. Amazing. Needless to say, the full article by Ms. Roberts was brilliant and I could not agree more with what she wrote.
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L'Albatros
Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.
À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l'azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d'eux.
Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!
L'un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme qui volait!
Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.
— Charles Baudelaire
And in English ...
The Albatross
Often, to amuse themselves, the men of a crew
Catch albatrosses, those vast sea birds
That indolently follow a ship
As it glides over the deep, briny sea.
Scarcely have they placed them on the deck
Than these kings of the sky, clumsy, ashamed,
Pathetically let their great white wings
Drag beside them like oars.
That winged voyager, how weak and gauche he is,
So beautiful before, now comic and ugly!
One man worries his beak with a stubby clay pipe;
Another limps, mimics the cripple who once flew!
The poet resembles this prince of cloud and sky
Who frequents the tempest and laughs at the bowman;
When exiled on the earth, the butt of hoots and jeers,
His giant wings prevent him from walking.