clueless connection

Arizona Daily Wildcat

Recall a scene from earlier this semester, when a promo for cellular phones transformed the Mall into a scene out of a Dali painting, or a Tim Burton movie.

The cellular phone company placed a giant inflated cellular phone at one end of our grassy Mall and painted it red, white and blue. The paint was configured into the pattern of the American flag. The giant cell phone was the flag, the flag was the cell phone. The height of the machine-pumped cellular phone towered at least 20 feet and cast a shadow that darkened the faces of students gathered around it, peering up in awe as if they were looking at a gift from God.

Now the campus is littered with students flipping open their cell phones, dialing and having a private conversation in public as though there is nothing wrong with it. As though they weren't 19, wearing silver eye shadow, and Mom and Dad weren't taking care of the bill.

Maybe it's our generation's urge to feel radically important. Maybe it's our generation's egotistical drive to stumble toward uncertainty, or worse historical irrelevance. We want to be adults so fast that we pretend our lives are more complicated than they truly are. Rather than Spring Break, mid-terms and what happened on Felicity, we wish our conversations were about closing contract deals and having power lunches at Spago. We're posers, in and out.

Maybe we don't know what to do with ourselves if we're not able to dial and instantly connect with whomever, for whatever, whenever we feel the need for contact. Today, cell phones are not only used as status symbols for the materialistically vulgar (which ironically dictates that those who have small ones hold more power), but are also acting as tranquilizers for those aching to reach out and touch someone. Much like the way a diabetic needs sugar so as not to seize, our generation needs cell phones to feel whole.

According to an article published in the New York Times, about one million customers sign up for cellular phone service each month, and according to experts, cell phone subscribers in the United States will double to 113.7 million within five years. That's a lot of Nokia's. That's a lot of VIP series Motorola's. That's a lot of overindulged individuals whose humanity is sliding and sliding. Or should I say their humanity is electric-sliding.

The first individuals to use cell phones worked in the medical profession (which seemed justified), but then slowly, everyone seemed to have one. Until finally, you can't get through a movie, or a college class lecture without someone's cell phone ringing, and guiltlessly doing so. No average college student needs a cell phone.

It's true that young people do have responsibilities. Our generation perpetuates the honing of technology's edge. We've known how to use computers since birth, and with our innate ability to Quark our way to Excel, some of us have become powerful business persons. Those individuals, the ones making millions of dollars and who are barely able to buy beer, are the ones who need cell phones. The student on campus coordinating a Thursday night glitz-glam assault on Maloney's does not.

It's inevitable that as technology changes, so do our habits. Also inevitable is the morphing of public tolerance to the socially acceptable lines now drawn by technology. We live in a world that uses cell phones, and as annoying and putrid as it is to watch 20-year-olds flip their cells in class, at the movies, or standing in line, in the end we will have to accept them. Unless we don't, which would then make it socially acceptable to slap them and ask them to shut up. Either way, someone's going to get hurt.

The coming years of mass cell phone use may be littered with contempt by those who don't own one, toward those who do. And those who do own cell phones will have forgotten how communication works without paying a monthly bill. In the end, yelling at them in person may be useless. We might have to call them to do it.