We’re connected, but more alone

Cell phones may provide a good show, but they rob us of intimacy

By Anne Taylor Fleming

Cellular telephones are so ever present now that we somehow no longer bother about them or register the profound changes they have wrought in our culture and our behavior. After all, we’ve all had telephones forever. The cell phone is just a ready-to-trot wireless version, a gadget of the utmost convenience. So what’s the big deal?
The big deal is that the cellular phone has completely changed the way we behave in public and, even more, completely blurred the line between the public sphere and the private without us even realizing it, with wide-reaching implications for how we treat each other- and ourselves.

The technology got ahead of any etiquette, and sense we might have a public decorum, so that we no longer blanch when we overhear people confiding in, yelling at or cooing in the ear of someone else through their cell phones. We’ve become a nation of compulsive communicators, nonstop babblers airing our most private thoughts in the most public of places- an airport lounge, a restaurant banquette, a city street.

We’re now all part of each other’s audiences. It’s as if we live in a virtual-reality TV talk show, a rolling 12 step public marathon, with complete strangers spewing out intimacies or fighting right in front of us, needful of the validation of our attention. It’s as if nothing is real anymore unless it happens in public with an audience, and the cellular phone is the perfect little gizmo to make this possible.
You don’t have to wangle your way onto “Jerry” or Oprah.” Or any of the other confessional TV shows. All you need is a public place and a cellular telephone, and you can be center state, living one of your life’s little or big dramas out loud for all the rest of us to overhear. Look at me, the caller says. I’m somebody. I can’t even wait to get back to the office or to a pay phone. I have to make this call right now. I am needed. I am important. Just listen. My friends love me. My kids need me. My boss can’t breathe without me. I matter.

What’s wrong with all of us? Why the desperate need to be vocally tethered to someone else at all times? Can we not stand the downtime, the silence of our own company? Even children are wired up, toting their own phones and beepers, so that they, too, will learn to be strangers to themselves, unused to stillness, unaware that there is, or should be, a demarcation between public and private.
Only in private do we take the measure of our own gifts and failings- no doubt why we avoid it so. Only in private- away from the crowd and the audience- do we do original and creative work and plumb the depths of our consciences. Only in private do we experience the truest and deepest emotions, be they agony or ecstasy.

The rest is posturing: Life as a spectator sport, precisely what we’ve turned sex into. The accent is not longer on the act itself but on the postcoital play-by-play. Like the tabloid TV shows, the postmodern sitcom is often little else but a titillating talkathon in which groups of friends sit around and dissect their sexual encounters for each other. They cannibalize their meaningful experiences and turn them into cheap anecdotes to be served up on a platter to the rest of their clique.

These phones have changed a very nature of gossip; they’ve made it quicker, crueler, more pervasive and instantaneous. There is no time to edit, pull back, savor. Everything is fodder, fair game, grist for the cell-phone mill.

All to say that we seem to have given up on privacy altogther- on the very idea of its virtures. You’re not alone as long as you have your phone tucked your purse or pocket, your cellular hedge against loneliness.

No doubt, that’s what the phones are ultimately about: loneliness and a frantic attempt to evade it. But the irony is that they make it worse. Think of it: You’re walking down a throbbing city street, noise and people all around, human pageantry, but you’re busy chatting with a friend or arguing with a spouse via your speed dial. You’re coocooned disconnected from the things and people around you, experiencing that weird nonintimate- intimacy, that weird public-privacy that characterizes so many of our modern interactions, be they via the cellular phone or the Internet. It’s not unusual these days to see two people having lunch, forks in hand, talking not to each other but to someone else via their respective cell phones. Clearly we’re more hooked up than ever and, on some level, more lonesome. Why else all the manic phoning, then need to be reachable by somebody, anybody, anywhere and everywhere?

By any measure, cell phones waste more time than they save, like many of our other so-called “timesaving devices.” They embroil us in endless, unnecessary chatter that only serves to abbreviate our already overstimulated attention spans.

Yes, there are true emergencies- on the road, in an accident, in a faltering democracy where a coup is imminent. Then a cellular phone can be a lifeline. But that’s not what most people are using them for on a daily basis. They’re using them to ward off the stillness, the demons, the specter of loneliness.