My Phone

My phone is one of those flip phones, I can’t tell what brand. This phone is a bit more than I need. I wanted a basic phone, one with just text messaging and voice. But the store and my provider, is that right!?—no carrier—had this phone, which was as simple and basic as the employee or representative, could find.

The young man behind the counter—who possessed an impressive thicket of facial hair and wore trousers so narrow I feared for his circulation—looked at my request with the profound, pitying exhaustion usually reserved for someone trying to pay for a modern automobile with Spanish doubloons. He tried to steer me toward a slab of glowing glass that cost more than my first used sedan. “It has three lenses, Grandpa,” he told me, using that condescending corporate syntax designed to make aging feel like a technical malfunction. I told him I only wanted to talk to people who already expected to hear from me, and preferably not very often. He sighed, tapped irritably on a tablet that hummed with quiet judgment, and produced my current folding rectangle from a dusty drawer near the mop bucket.

I agreed, and purchased the phone for $75.00. It’s a good phone. I like it because it’s small, compact, and easily flips open. Of course, it’s not very smart. But plenty of smart phones exist, and most people want them. I think smart phones are for smart people. Maybe that’s why I bought this phone.

It has a small display, about 3” and has phone, messaging, settings, a clock, calendar, and a few more icons. That word is strange, icon. As a noun, its definition is as a visual model (of an object, scene, person or abstraction) fabricated on some surface. It’s also a sacred picture representing the Virgin Mary, Christ, a saint or a martyr, and having the same function as an image of such a person in the Latin Church. That said, most of these icons I simply don’t need. I have never felt an urgent spiritual compulsion to genuflect before my calendar application or light a votive candle beneath my battery-percentage indicator.

At night, my phone will occasionally wake up. It might be an incoming text message. No, that’s not it. That has a sound accompanying it. This makes no sound. Maybe it’s because I plug it in all night and it’s letting me know it’s fully charged and to unplug me so to speak. Or perhaps it is simply lonely. In the quiet dark of the bedside table, it casts a pale, spectral blue glow across the wallpaper, as if dreaming of a data network it will never touch. It suffers in silence, a digital monk practicing an asceticism forced upon it by a deeply unimaginative owner.

You can actually browse the web on this phone. Imagine, me, at my age, using such a small display to browse the web!? I can barely see the web when I use a laptop. I think that’s why I don’t bother with smart phones. After all, they’re really all about the web, social mediation and self–adoration. I don’t really care much about the web; other than the occasional item I need to look up—such as whether planting rutabagas in November is an act of optimism or agricultural vandalism.

As far as concerns social mediation, I think like some technologists today, we’d all be better off deleting these accounts of us. I never had any accounts of my own—never. I’ve never faced any friends, or defaced any, never tweeted, twitted, chirped or blogged late into the night. And taking into account any portrayal of self, creating portraits of myself for my friends to see, well; I’m either too old, too reflective, or both.

It is a fascinating public theater to watch. Walk down any sidewalk, and you will witness legions of otherwise sensible citizens wandering about like somnambulists, bowing deeply before handheld altars. They march into traffic, collide with mailboxes, and tumble over park benches, all while passionately explaining to a digital void what they had for breakfast or recording a video of their own face expressing spontaneous, rehearsed delight. One wonders if natural selection has simply taken a coffee break. We have engineered an environment where looking down at a piece of glass is considered normal survival behavior, while looking up at the sky or catching the eye of a passing stranger is treated as an aggressive psychological threat.

Once, years ago, when I was in the Army a friend of mine went in for a psych evaluation. He was trying very hard to get out of the Army, for obvious reasons. They said he was attention seeking and gave him a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder.

They told him he had delusions of grandeur and an exaggerated sense of self–worth, a sense of entitlement that requires constant, excessive admiration, that he wanted recognition for superior achievements without merit; had fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty and the perfect mate, believed he was superior and could only associate with other special people, that he insisted on the best of everything—namely, the best car, office or phone for that matter. They discharged him for this reason and told him he’d be better off being a promotional mascot, politician or CEO. I don’t know what happened to him, although I wonder if he might be a hyperactive bunny, running for senate or working in Silicon Valley. Today, of course, the military would not discharge him; they would hand him a corporate smartphone, a ring light, and a promotion to Director of Social Media Strategy.

My phone has a long battery life. I believe I could talk on it for about 6 or 7 hours before it would run down. I never talk on the phone, well, hardly ever. Usually, that is, most of the time, my battery life drops to 98% over an entire day. Then, at night, I recharge it back to 100%. That way, my battery life stays in the range of 90–100%. The screen, at times, seems a bit pixilated. I suppose, it’s because of its reasonable price. Still, I like it though.

If you think about it, my phone is a great invention. Allowing me to talk for hours on end and about absolutely nothing. What a marvel of modern civilization is my phone. Alex Bell would be pleased to hear, maybe over my phone, that his invention is alive and well. I suppose Alex Bell was really a sociologist, anthropologist, or psychologist or a bit of all of these. After all, the technical part was not that remarkably difficult; taking a sound wave, converting it to a mechanical motion, and then transforming that to an electrical impulse, undoing and reversing the entire process at the receiving end.

I trivialize, of course. But the bigger Alex Bell marvel was his recognition that what he was working on would revolutionize the world. Most technology is that way. It’s not worked on for its own sake, as if a mathematical problem might be or some philosophical puzzle or conundrum. Phones, cars, etc., are not notably pure in any true sense of the word. People work on and use them because they want to further humankind and are very much aware of the importance of progress. “A humbling thought,” you might add—especially when you consider that centuries of human ingenuity, electrical engineering, and telecommunications infrastructure have ultimately culminated in teenagers using the global network to send videos of cats falling off kitchen counters to total strangers in sub-Saharan Africa.

Lastly, my phone, although such an astonishing and wonderful device, is not my life. I don’t keep it as a cardinal locus of my self–worth, examining with it; self, society, culture and other assorted mysteries, or for that matter, my religion, as if my phone could really act as an external frame of reference for my pleasure, pain and other psychological affects and defects. Sure, it might have a cool display or be overheard above the clamor and chatter of a grinding daily existence.

Despite that, it is nothing but an artificial fiction. And artificial fictions need voiding. What voids the artificial fiction of my phone? Religion!? Philosophy!? An interminable and endless search for the meaning of life? I doubt it. But I’m sure I can find much more meaning in these natural fictions, in the belief of something greater than myself, be it God, the middle way or the sheer weirdness of existence—still, something extraordinary in life, something greatly more fabricated than my phone, that brings me guidance, teaches me respect for myself and others, something that brings me out of the illusion of the display, of some incessant need to text back and forth, take a selfie, or talk and ramble on nonstop about the meaningless drivel distributed and distorted by modern media—something much, much more than my virtuous and noble telephone.

Kenneth Myers