Living in a Blackberry World

Let me start by saying I am pretty darned fond of my cell phone. Especially my new one with the QWERTY keyboard that lets me text a heck of a lot more easily than I could in the past. 

But that's just me. After all, I'm 56 years old, I've been using a simple old cell phone intermittently for 12 years, and I just now upgraded to a texting phone. And that's all I want it to do ... at least for the foreseeable future. I wasn't at all discouraged by the reviews of the phone I decided to purchase that indicated it wouldn't plug in properly to their laptop to convert blah blah blah to HTML. It simply wasn't important to me. And two years from now if I need something different, I might decide to get it. Or maybe not.

I'm a little more concerned, however, about little kids who are obviously living in a Blackberry-oriented world, and what does that say about not only the kids ... but us?

Let me explain. My seven-year-old grandson has never been one who liked talking on a telephone. I remember how much I liked it when my kids got little play telephones (and theirs were all dial-phones, we hadn't even upgraded to touch-tone yet). Listening in to their imaginary conversations with grandma or friends was really a lot of fun. But I also had kids who didn't really want to bother with it, so I wasn't really dismayed that Chase wasn't interested. Peyton has certainly made up for his reticence, anyway. 

Lately, however, Chase has been begging for a cell phone. I can sort of see that. When my kids were little, we had a family land line, of course. If someone wanted to reach anyone in our family, adult or child, they would call one number and they could ask for the person they wanted to speak with. It worked for a long time. We set some ground rules for telephone use, and obviously those rules were bent or circumvented by clever teenagers. As my younger kids got into high school, started driving, and cell phones became de rigeur, it seemed more important that they get their own phones. And, of course, pay the bills for them. And eventually, like so many other families, the land-line fell into such disuse that it no longer seemed reasonable to keep it.

So yes, I have heard all the arguments for (and against) cell phones for the younger set. And I can see that kids who don't have a land line in their home are kind of at a disadvantage. Who wants to call someone's mom, just to see if Chase can come out and play? Working parents with latchkey kids need to know where their children are. Those pay phones we relied on to get a ride home, have all been pulled out of  the schools (and most other places as well). 

Anyway, last week, Chase came home from his dad's house with his "own" cell phone. I quickly figured out that this was just a discarded phone. Obviously there was no service connected to it and there was no read-out on the back panel but it did hold a charge and light up and so it seemed somewhat "real" to Chase. 

As the weekend progressed, it was obvious that Chase had gotten more and more attached to this phone. Every few minutes he would ask me if I had a cord so he could charge his phone. He would pull it out every five seconds to check and see if it was ringing or if he had a message or whatever, even when I told him it needed to stay in his pocket. It started getting a little bit irritating. But I finally overheard the imaginary conversations that I've been waiting for ever since the kid could talk: "So, what are you doing right now? Uh huh. Well, I'm at my Mimi and Boppy's and we're cooking marshmallows on the bonfire. Yup. Uh huh. You want to go for a bike ride tomorrow? Great. I'll see you then. I'll text you when I'm ready to go ..."

Unfortunately, he seemed to be ready to go on that bike ride at some point during the children's message at church. Just like any other kid, as soon as he was beyond our reach, all of those guidelines about cell phone etiquette that we had discussed flew right out the window. There he was, in front of God and everybody, tapping away at his cell phone keypad instead of participating in what was actually happening. 

Of course his mom confiscated the phone immediately afterward, and it doesn't appear to be re-surfacing any time soon. But it has got me wondering. What kind of reflection on society--and on me personally--does this show? He's only imitating the exact same things he's seen us do. 

I regularly pull my phone out of my pocket just to look at it. It hasn't rung or beeped or anything else, but I pull it out anyway. I have been known to frantically ask where the cell phone charger is, because I've left it in the wrong place again. 

David often uses the easy-tip-calculator function on his phone (I wish that function would include a disclaimer that a $3.36 tip is only a suggested amount, and you don't need to go digging through your pockets for exact change, but that's a whole different story). 

I see Chase's mom's phone go jiggling across the table every 15 seconds for 10 minutes straight because she's having an extended text conversation with some mystery person that she evidently doesn't want to waste time talking to in person. There's a "like" page on Facebook that is called something like "Texting the person next to you something you don't want to say out loud." OK, so we can quietly insult people sitting on the other side of us? Every kid on every television show (even the cartoons) seems to have a cell phone that they pull out constantly. 

You can even play games on your cell phone. I recently discovered Tetris on mine. Fortunately, it was only a trial version and I quickly timed out. Otherwise, I'd be furthering the stereotype.

It's everywhere--but we're certainly perpetuating it. 

So, while we can consider this a valuable social experiment that was not-quite-a-success for Chase at this time, maybe we ought to look at our own selves, too, and see what kind of social distortion we're all experiencing with our Blackberry Worlds.