The Phone Event Horizon

Sometimes I feel like I’m walking in a wide corridor, filled with other people, except they’re all heading in the other direction, and I can’t figure out why. Example: this slashdotted piece on DrunkenBlog, which touches on various Digital Rights Management issues, but especially the idea of the convergence of various digital doodads – including, notably, Apple’s iPod – on, heaven forfend, the mobile phone. The scrambling for a piece of the legal digital music industry at the moment is indeed ferocious, and I don’t even pretend to be keeping up with it. I’m old-fashioned enough to prefer to buy CDs and then rip them to my laptop anyhow. Even though the days of vinyl gatefold magnificence are long gone, I still want the actual thing in my hand, damnit. Think of it as an a priori backup, if you like. But I do care enough that the idea of a mobile phone being the foundation of my digital life makes me want to gag.

I fully plan to be the last person on earth without a mobile phone. Phones generally strike me as hateful things. Their job is to interrupt you when you’re doing something else, and then demand your attention. I have a truly physical reaction to the strident ringing of a telephone – especially, but not exclusively, when the call might be for me. It makes me tense, anxious, somewhere in my stomach. Go away, already. Send me an e-mail, which I can read when I’m ready, and then respond to in my own way, in my own time. Or I can ignore, if I’m not interested. Whatever.

Social telephone conversations are a kind of torture. I think in general I try to say something when I’ve got something to say, and shut the fuck up at other times; that mode doesn’t transfer to phone conversations, which seem to me something like a tennis match, each person batting the ball gently back across the net. Put on the spot like that, I either clam up or make some feeble attempt to engage in, horrors, small talk, which I’m about as fluent in as Welsh, and which is as baffling to me. In person, conversation can have lulls and pauses, and naturally does. But over the phone silence is as deadly as to a radio DJ, and the pressure of looming silence turns me into a bag of nerves. I like silence. There’s not nearly enough of it in the world. Actively trying to avoid silence when one has nothing particular to say feels deeply wrong.

Now, mobile phones have all of the irritation of their sedentary cousins, and add some more too. They go off in cinemas, and theatres, and libraries. They simply must be used whilst driving, it seems. I realise that I’m not exactly a people person, but, good grief, how much do people have to say to each other, such that they need to be contactable twenty-four hours a day?

The DrunkenBlog piece includes this bit of cognitive dissonance:

If you take a look at your desk, there are lots of gadgets you want to take with you. Your mobile phone of course, your PDA, your MP3 player, your USB pen-drive, your digital camera. But out of all of these, there’s only one that you generally have with you at all times: your phone. Everything else is secondary; if you had to pick one thing, chances are it’s going to be your phone.

Beg pardon? Putting aside the fact that, of those gadgets, the only one I actually own is the USB pen-drive thingy, this paragraph couldn’t describe me any less accurately. I’d love to have a nice compact digital camera to carry around with me in my bag, ready to capture whatever. I’d love to have an iPod too. The PDA can realistically go screw itself; my laptop is almost small enough to carry almost everywhere I go, and big enough that I have to ask myself: do I really need this with me at all times? The answer to which is, of course, no. Besides, isn’t what most people have on PDAs the sort of stuff that they’d have on their mobile phones these days? See? I have absolutely no idea. The technology flies past me like a mildly-irritating, buzzing thing that wants some lemonade. But the phone, the object of greatest desire for so many, wouldn’t be on the desk in the first place. Unless it was someone else’s desk, and I was just hoping to steal their Post-It notes. Now that’s advanced technology.

Within a few blocks of where I’m sitting writing this, there are five mobile phone shops. Big gaudy things, the shops are essentially extended banner ads – outside and inside – for the products, the tiny, wee little phones that sit amongst the gaudery like venerated relics inside the hushed space of a cathedral. Douglas Adams wrote a piece in the original radio version of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide, in which Arthur ends up on a world that’s been torn apart by – we eventually discover – a gradual creeping take-over by shoe-shops. The episode introduces the concept of the ‘shoe event horizon’, a point at which shoe shops have taken over so completely that no other kind of shop can exist. It’s a kind of apocalypse for the civilisation, which implodes and reverts to more primitive times, living off the ground, where shoes aren’t needed. I can’t help thinking, in a not-very-serious-but-hey-this-is-a-blog sort of way, that we’re heading towards a ‘phone event horizon’. If that meant that we’d subsequently revert to simpler, quieter times, when we talk – quietly, thoughtfully – with people when we’re actually with them, and otherwise write – quietly, thoughtfully – to people when we’re not with them, then it can’t come quick enough for me.