I purchased my first cell phone in 1989 from a friend who had upgraded. And no wonder. It was called a “brick” and, when attached to my belt, brought my jeans to my knees. I don’t remember ever completing a call with it. First impressions are forever, and I was done with “cell phones”.
My next experience with cell phones came a decade later while on a trip to a mine in Andean Argentina. In driving to the mine site, my client promised me a surprise if I agreed to hike up a rather high hill with him. He had driven by the hill several times and climbing it was on his bucket list. Being up for a surprise, I agreed and four hours later we were a thousand meters above the desert floor looking into the majesty of the white capped Andes mountains. Just as I worried that my surprise was limited to the vista before us, he pulled a small flip phone from his pocket and said I could phone anyone in the world. I called my wife as she was shepherding the kids to church and the clarity of the communication link was unbelievable. And it fit into his pocket without giving him a “plumber’s crack”.
I was now a big believer in cell phones and almost ready for my own phone. But cell phones cost money and I was not so keen on clear communications that I would willingly part with cash. At a client symposium in Peru, I was to receive the cell phone baptism that overcame my spending shyness. The symposium consisted of a half dozen of my colleagues and perhaps a dozen Peruvian client employees gathered at a hotel for a three-day strategy session. The client employees were in suits and ties, and we were rather more casual. At the first break I was told that someone from head office was trying to contact me and when I enquired about a phone, I was told, “Just use my cell phone.” After a brief training session, I began to plumb the depths of this strange and exciting new technology on my own. I was told that the reception would likely be better if I walked across the room to the outside windows. I stared intently at the phone punching in numbers as I walked through the crowd of colleagues and clients. I scarcely noticed passing through the divider of potted palms and I only knew that I was in trouble when my foot dropped an eighth of an inch below where I thought it should stop. It is remarkable how sensitive our brains are when expected outcomes are unrealized. On the other side of the potted palms was a large swimming pool which I entered with a loud splash and perhaps a louder shriek. Fortunately, the owner of the phone found my predicament so hilarious that he was willing to write off his loss. The Peruvian clients, with significantly less hilarity, began to think that their investment in the strategy session was wasted if I represented the quality of consultant they had hired. I wish I could say that I had the presence of mind to exclaim something like, “I don’t know what happened. Usually, I walk across these things.” It might have blunted some of the obvious client angst.
As remarkable as cell phone technology has become in the developed world, it is nothing compared to the transformation of the developing world. When we lived in Colombia BCP (before cell phones), the apartment we rented had two land lines. The owner of the apartment (and we) wanted reliable phone service and so he installed the two lines. The problem was that the phone exchange did not have the capacity for all the apartments to have land lines and so our lines were regularly reassigned to other apartments in the building. The premium we paid to have a least one working telephone was not a good investment.
However, with the advent of cell phone technology, communications in Latin America took a remarkable leap forward passing over all the North American improvements to analog telephone systems. By 1996, they moved from the 1930’s to the 2010’s even as North America continues to struggle to catch up. Cell phones are ubiquitous in all parts of Latin America, the phone costs are much less than what they are in Canada and the plethora of service providers ensures competition and low prices. My metaphor for rapid communication advances will forever be a locked box with small cubby holes for the cell phones of visitors to Peruvian government agencies. Before entering the building, all phones had to be surrendered and it was entertaining to watch the vibrating phones dancing solo in their cubby holes behind the locked plastic door.
And it is not just Latin America that has communications systems that are more advanced than in North America. Telephone banking and automatic account withdrawal notifications were common in Africa before the technology came to Canada. The distribution of cell towers may be less dense in the developing world than in North America, but they are coming and perhaps Starlink satellites will even the score in the next few years. The communications advances in the developing world over the past twenty-five years have been breathtaking.
But has it been an unmitigated blessing? As with all advances, our ability to adapt to and maximize the benefits of new technology has not kept pace with its implementation. Think of the times you have watched a young couple on a date sitting at the restaurant table texting to friends and perhaps to each other completely oblivious of each other’s presence. Or the many times you have sat like an old coot on a park bench and watching young mothers and fathers desultorily pushing their kids on the swing with eyes glued to the ever-present phone. Perhaps I am the only one to sit on park benches like an old coot, but you may have seen what I have described. Do contractions such as “lol” and “fomo” add value to the English lexicon? How many text messages have taken hours of subsequent explaining because the grammar was wrong or the autocorrect created a message that was both untrue and highly inflammatory.
On my one trip to New York City, I watched in amazement as a young Black woman on the subway seat next to me texted on her phone with thumbs blazing their way through the keyboard at a speed rivalling the best of the pool stenographers of an earlier period. No doubt the message was coded in a mysterious language like the stenographer’s shorthand. My fascination caught her attention and she unsuccessfully tried to teach me the tricks of “touch typing” on a smart phone.
Ah yes… smart phone. Is it so smart after all or is it an enormous time waster and distraction? How many times have I made investment presentations to young “movers and shakers” who stopped me every time their phone dinged to announce an incoming email or text? Besides being beyond rude, is a reminder to buy bread on the way home from work really a “power move”?
I remember reading articles in the late 1990’s about the coming convergence of internet and cellular technologies. The TV manufacturers were tempting me to watch newly released movies on their large plasma and then LCD screens and the phone manufacturers were tempting me to buy their phones to watch the same movies only on a screen the size of a business card. It was not clear to me which would win the battle and I should have recognized that we would opt for “all of the above”. I was just happy to have my contact list on the phone and I haven’t progressed too far beyond that. This hasn’t prevented me from accidentally erasing that list with disappointing regularity but every once in awhile it will deliver a desired address when properly queried. My antipathy and clumsiness with cellular technology has perhaps kept me in a communication shadow. I don’t know how to turn on location services and so am known only by my cell tower pings. As the documentary “2000 Mules” has pointed out, this does not save me from the prying eyes of the government but at least I remain an indistinct entity within “big data”.
But the idea of Google and the government knowing my favoured coffee haunts disturbs me, nevertheless. Apparently, I am not alone because there are now several companies offering cell phones which prevent third party applications from gathering and transmitting data from the phone and which shroud the cell tower pings so that the phone location cannot be easily mapped. It is not a trivial concern as there are increasing instances of teenagers being followed by bad people who are accessing their phone location data.
There are also the physiological concerns created by the stress of a ringing or beeping phone. I remember, as a hormone filled teenager with no discernable skills dealing with the distaff set, pacing in front of the family telephone as I worked up the courage to call a girl and ask her on a date. The response of my autonomic nervous system (high anxiety, sweaty palms, tense muscles, and brain fuzziness) was heightened with each call due, I suppose, to the lack of success in the intended purpose of the calls. But these symptoms are now being reported by teens who have access to a smart phone. Those who study such things tell us that the constant alerts from a Facebook or Twitter or email or text message results in high anxiety, sweaty palms, tense muscles, and brain fuzziness. The instances of this anxiety in my life can be counted on one hand but today teens are in a constant state of physiological attention and anxiety.
It must be awful. Such responses are designed to save us from sabre-tooth tigers and not an incoming text message. Are applications designers taking advantage of this phenomenon in the design of their software? The answer appears to be yes, and we unwittingly give our children over to such experimentation. Research suggests that 89 percent of college students report feeling “phantom” phone vibrations calling them to a fight or flight stance. Another study suggests the 86% of Americans check their email and social media accounts constantly and then acknowledge that this “stresses them out”. Endocrinologist Robert Lustig told Business Insider that notifications from our phones are training our brains to be in a near constant state of stress and fear by establishing a stress-fear memory pathway. And such a state means that the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brains that normally deals with some of our highest-order cognitive functioning, goes completely haywire, and basically shuts down.
"You end up doing stupid things," Lustig says. "And those stupid things tend to get you in trouble."
There are many virtues to the rapid advances in communications technologies over the past twenty-five years but, as always, the virtues do not come untinctured by vices. To capture the virtues and eliminate the vices it is necessary to understand what purpose you want the technology to serve in adding to the contentment quotient of your life. I think we might need to be a bit more deliberative in how we use the technology. Is a $75 per month data plan necessary to survival or can it be limited or eliminated? Does your 12-year-old need a smart phone to communicate with you or will a less Einsteinian flip phone do the trick? The issue is not in the answers to the questions necessarily but that the questions be asked. That, at least, is what I think.
Just a minute… I might have a text coming in and it has been fifteen minutes since I checked…