When examining a cellular phone, at first one may think that it is an unnecessary device aimed at being frivolous and looking like you’re constantly busy. These are not, however, the limits of the cellular phone in any respect. The cell phone’s use outweighs even its cultural negatives. It allows the portability of personal communication at a level never before seen by man. It facilitates the spread of the Internet into mediums never imagined. It makes easy the storing of vast quantities of telephone numbers into the database of each phone. The usefulness of the cell phone dwarf the implications that it brings to our consciousness as a culture and as a people.

We must examine not only our own lives, but the lives of others who do not possess the technologies we do. We will use, for the lack of a better example in our current world climate, Africa. Most countries in Africa have marginal percentages of the levels of penetration we have of the cellular phone. Many of these countries are barren even of the computer, and by proxy the Internet Even landline phones, in some parts of the continent, are rare or even nonexistent. So how, then, would we explain a cellular phone to an animistic tribe in the deepest jungles of the Congo? How would we tell a destitute woman that we can call our friends halfway around the world with a piece of plastic and silicon that costs an amount of money equivalent to her yearly wages? How does a starving child know what a text message means, or how he could use it? It seems so absurd to think that such a device exists in such an absurd world. Seems to be an issue of priority.

Cellular phones were not always the marvels of miniaturization, innovation, and communication that they are today. When cellular phones were first developed, they cost several thousand dollars, were bulky and unreliable, had almost no coverage, and were a massive eyesore. This is in concert with many technologies of the past– the first automobiles, the first firearms, the first televisions, the first landline telephones– but still, the proponents of these technologies soldiered on, garnering the needed publicity that these needed to succeed. Often mocked by the public for spending massive amounts of money for useless items, these people became the norm once everyone rushed out and bought the next generation. Smaller, cheaper cars, televisions, and computers all led to the ubiquity of these items, forever locked within the public psyche as just another part of daily life. The cell phone was no exception.

Every day, millions of Americans awaken and leave their homes, cellphones in tow. They are easily reachable, connected into the grid of society, inseparable to the network of airwaves and accountability. Cell phones, however, are becoming even less of a simple communications device and more of a status symbol. Small phones, flip phones, phones with keyboards on them, phones that take pictures, video, and sound. All these are qualities of the best phones on the market and the individuals that posses them are top-rung on the social ladders, especially in college and high school. But unalarmingly, the older generations do not have any need for such immersion into such an illogical world. My grandfather has a simple, battered cell phone that doesn’t have a camera, doesn’t play music, and doesn’t even have a full-color screen. Utility is far more important in a technology, and this seeps into other technologies besides the cellular phone.

I think that it is fair to say that there is a certain allure, both aesthetically and intrinsically, of the cellular phone. It is not a light investment to make, financially or emotionally, to purchase a $300 device that permanently connects you to the modern culture the moment you give your number away. Therefore, it is not hard to imagine how connected people become to these items. The constantly use them, perhaps not even out of necessity but out of desire to get a large volume of use out of something so expensive. Soon, they become part of a person. It’s something they always have with them, not unlike their watch, their wallet, or their keys. In a way, we become subliminally connected to these devices in ways that we don’t comprehend or even think about. It is the same phenomenon with television, computers, iPods, and even something so basic as credit cards or watches.

The very idea of a neutral technology seems at first to seem a bit ridiculous, but then one comes to realize that all technologies, at the basic level, are neutral. A technology by itself has no power to act upon or affect a culture or a people– such is the curse of a construct that is absent of consciousness. It is the constructs that do possess consciousness (i.e. Humanity) that influence technologies to have negative influences upon a culture or a group of people. The harnessing of electricity was surely never imagined as a form of capital punishment. The television was not invented to give birth to two generations of children who are bombarded with media and rarely get the exercise they need. Few things are created and left to be for a single application. Technology is not the culprit in any sense of the word– the true hijackers of our culture are the victims themselves, perpetuating the problems by reapplying old technologies into roles ill-suited to them.

Human interaction has changed so much in the last thirty years, first with the Internet and then with things like instant messaging, e-mail, and cellular phones. Now, in our modern and progressive digital age, cellphones have taken those three individual technologies and made them the nexus of functionality for these devices. A person can now hold a conference call, text a friend in New York, and be instant messaging her mother in Asia, all at the same time from a device the size of a candy bar. While this would be certainly boggling to Marconi– who only imagined a world where we could talk to one another across an ocean– such things are ubiquitous with our everyday lives. We give no second thought to what these technologies mean to us because they’ve simply always been here. We take advantage of every feature with ease and bravado, throwing caution to the wind and roughly tackling technology and throwing it to the ground triumphantly.

So herein lies the coup de grace, of you will. While we as a culture, especially in America, have dropped the ball on erring the side of caution, we have developed a device that is incredibly useful. We have abused this device beyond the imaginings of its creators, not unlike most technologies. I’m looking at you, Enrico Fermi, Karl Benz, Tim Berners-Lee, Thomas Edison, Marconi, Davinci, and all the other inventors whose minds never fully grasped what their creations would mean for the world they lived in, for better or for worse.