Reveries of a Mobile Junkie
I have a confession to make… a secret addiction which I am bound to satisfy. It is both expensive and unnecessary, and if certain reports are to be believed, it also endangers my health. It’s not cigarettes or crack cocaine (that’s next week) but I am just as powerless against it. My name is Gareth Arnold and I am a mobile phone addict.
Ok, so it’s not as bad as all that, but nonetheless I’m hooked. I’ve had one since I was sixteen, and now can’t bear to be parted. I still don’t have a clue how they actually work, and to be honest, I don’t want to know. I experience something slightly unbelievable, magical even, when at the touch of a button I can discover my friends in a variety of banal situations, the details of which I had no need to discover. We use them mainly as location devices; they allow last minute changes of plan, they allow us to get lost with relative impunity, providing we have the number of a local taxi firm. They also allow your mother to phone you up when you’re really really stoned or having sex; then there are the people who talk loudly on trains, but these are minor quibbles. Mobiles are fantastic, and I find it increasingly hard to work out what people did without them. The proliferation of mobiles has changed the way we do things, and spawned its very own set of mores and manners that the discerning user ignores at his peril.
We’ve all heard social pundits talking about mobile phone etiquette, and to a limited extent, I think this exists. Unlike old skool landlines, you know when someone’s called you. If you don’t return the call, what are they going to think? You know when someone’s turned their phone off on you… or did it simply run out of batteries? Text messages are even more problematic, especially since some sinister Nokia employee came up with delivery reports, aimed squarely at the socially paranoid. This tells you exactly when your text reached the recipient’s phone. Now you sit back and wait for the reply, or not, as the case may be. Many a time have I watched an anxious house mate staring forlornly at their 3310, waiting for that special someone to send 160 characters of hope back through the ether.
Last year I bought one of those Nokia camera phones. At the moment, I think these retain some of the stigma that harks back to the early nineties, when people were still embarrassed when their phone went off in the street, answering it self-consciously, trying hard to be nonchalant when they felt everyone around them was thinking ‘poncy twat’. Give it a year however, and we’ll all be in on the game, sending our all-singing, all dancing multimedia messages into space without a thought to the consequences. This is when I think things will get interesting.
I am intrigued to know what sorts of picture are going to be flitting about the sky in years to come. Of course there will be the mandatory gurning mugs of people demonstrating to their friends, through inventive facial expressions, exactly how drunk they are. Consumer questions will also be solved through visual exchange. I can imagine husbands sent out with a credit card and a camera phone, their strict instructions to photograph any prospective purchase and clear it with H.Q before proceeding. However, we all know what text messages are really for, and it has nothing to do with shopping, or meeting David Beckham in the supermarket. Text messages are used for flirting, pure and simple. In fact, exchanging raunchy texts is seldom pure or simple. Squeezing witty rejoinders into 160 characters requires a huge amount of linguistic flexibility. Far from creating a generation of abbreviated philistines, text messaging has turned us into articulate acrobats of expression, forced to crowd our wit, charm and personality into a space shorter than this sentence.
So will picture messaging change all this? We all know that a picture says a thousand words, and nowhere will this be truer than in the case of titillating text messages. Indeed, judging by some of the beauties I’ve received in the past, texting could become a decidedly pornographic pasttime. With no regulation on the material being sent, and room for text as well as pictures (to specify exactly what sort of vegetable features most prominently) wrong numbers could become distinctly embarrassing. But maybe this is wishful thinking. The truth is that the multimedia messages most commonly beep-beep beep beeping into our inboxes won’t be the sizzling electric erotica we had hoped for; instead, tragically, I have one word for you: Spam.
When was the last time you checked your Hotmail account? I bet it was full of adverts for low cost loans, lower insurance premiums and inexplicably, penis enlargement. Be prepared in the next few years to have your mobile invaded by similar unwanted enticements, complete with blurb, pictures and even a little jingle providing exquisite annoyance to anyone in your vicinity. This will surely complicate the already complex relationship that we have with our mobiles. We want to be connected to our friends, and sometimes even our families, but we don’t want our Bosses phoning us up to find out exactly how ill we and why we haven’t been to work for three days. Be prepared to get even more frustrated as your inbox is inundated with rubbish, and the message you’ve been waiting for from that girl you met turns out to be an advert for the singles network. Buts it’s not a question of whether you love them or hate them; like all addictions it’s a love/hate situation, but at least you stand a chance of quitting cigarettes.
Loading ...