iSolated By His iPhone.

by Audrey Ference

This weekend, Frank joined the leagues of the iPhoned. Increasingly, I am one of the only people not to have one of these things. It reminds me of back when people were first getting cell phones (yes, I really am that old.)

I was in college and everyone sort of agreed that yeah, they’re pretty cool technology but really expensive and sort of obnoxious and unnecessary considering we all live on campus anyway. Then one winter break, everyone came back with one. And I think everyone had that one anti-cell phone holdout of a friend, that person who swore that they didn’t need one, that they pitied all the rest of us, tied to our phones, always reachable.

They, the iconoclasts, lived a life of freedom and boldness and non-worry that they might be missing out on something, somewhere, because they were not slaves to technology. And of course, they spent most of their time borrowing everyone else’s phones, giving out the number of the person they’d be with that day, until they finally acknowledged their hypocrisy and bought a freaking cell phone. I fear that I will become this person.

It makes me sort of sad. I got no beef with the iPhone. I think they’re neat. I’ve been an Apple loyalist since small times—I learned to type on a IIGS and never looked back. And I guess the issue isn’t the iPhone specifically, just any mobile email and internet machine, though I think that iPhone is clearly best in class at this point.

Basically I just can’t really afford to spend that much a month on phone service. Frank’s work is paying for his, since he needs to access his email all the time, so that’s awesome. Otherwise he’d probably not be able to get one either. But so I guess I never realized how much it is nearly a requirement for possessors of iPhones to pull them out and fiddle with at every lull in conversation.

I mean, I’d seen all my friends do it, but I thought that was either because they were important business people who might actually need to be reached, or excited about a new toy, or just kinda rude anyway. But no, I think that is just what we do now. Which, whatever, I’m not going to be that guy who writes some kind of screed about how it’s so sick that people watch TV too much or communicate by email instead of letters or whatever. I understand that the world moves on and sometimes that means we must suffer through a period of time where it is acceptable for people to whip out a mobile device and poke around whenever the feeling moves them.

It’s just not fair when only one half of a couple has the ability to do that. It’s uncanny to me how many people have iPhoned up lately, people I’d never suspect—haters of technology, PC users, anti-iPod weirdos. But I’ve noticed that almost universally if one half of a committed couple gets one, the other half follows suit within weeks.

I had attributed this to a pretty good family plan and gadget jealousy, but now I see that it is something else entirely. It is the lonely, Luddite feeling a person gets from looking at their fingernails or old text messages on a normal phone while a companion looks up the Virginia state flag or scrolls through their photos or giggles at a chat that they’d just received.

It’s like suddenly being at the table with your future grandchildren. “Nothing,” they say, or “Never mind” when you ask what’s so funny over there. Don’t you know that the fruits of interstitial dicking around are private, for the eyes of the device owner only? No, you do not, because you do not have a device. You have not instantly understood their code the moment you dropped that sleek little package into your pocket.

Sigh. It’s a lonely world we live in, my unconnected brothers and sisters.