In the past, telephones were mounted on walls, placed on desks, quickly to be found in the same place every time. Wide spread webs of wires connected phones to each other. A telephone was attached. You knew where it was. When you heard ringing, you went to the telephone, crossed rooms to get to the place where distant voices could speak into your private local ear.
When you were away from home you were away from the telephone. Calls went unheard and unanswered. Messages you might have heard you didn’t hear. Then, a technological breakthrough: the answering machine. Even if you weren’t home, your recorded voice was. “I’m not home. Leave a message.’
‘Sorry, I wasn’t home,’ has been removed from the list of approved excuses for our failure to communicate.
Now, with the cell phone, we are always near our phones, available, expected to respond. Friends are annoyed when we don’t answer. Cell phones interrupt conversations, disturb meals in nice restaurants, distract drivers, irritate patients in doctors’ waiting rooms. We wear cell phones like accessories, carry them in pants pockets, in jacket pockets, in purses. We put them down somewhere everywhere. We panic when they’re nowhere to be found. They could be anywhere. Cell phones can be lost or dropped or damaged. They cannot be misplaced. Cell phones have no assigned place. They are godlike, ubiquitous.
In theaters, churches, libraries we are told to silence our phones. If we dread dialogic isolation, phones can be switched to vibrate. A quiver in our pocket, our pulse spikes. Someone somewhere in the world wants to talk. Alarm or importance. The phone reveals our inner mood. As we drive our cars, our voices leap from tower to tower keeping track of our location in time and space. Our conversations cross distances, yet we dropped the ‘tele’ and kept the ‘phone.’
Cell phones liberate us, release us from the wired life.
Yet I wonder, if we are wireless and free to move about, why do we call our phone a cell.