Flexibility and the Cell Phone – The Second Installment on the Thoughts about Technology Series

For those of us who remember a time BCP (Before Cell Phones) the following scenario will be all too familiar. You are scheduled to have lunch with your mother at a certain restaurant today when, at 10 am you get a call from a good friend from college whose flight has been delayed and now she has time to go to lunch with you before her connecting flight leaves. What do you do? You can try to call your mother, but she is at a meeting and you can’t phone her there. You could leave a message on her answering machine, if she has one, in the hopes she checks her messages before she leaves for the restaurant. You can stand her up. You can ask your friend to the same lunch which, while not the optimum solution, is probably the best compromise, unless your friend and mother do not get along. Today, with the ubiquitous nature of cell phones, this scenario would be very unlikely. You could call or text your mom and explain the situation and move your lunch date.

With cell phones saturating our society today many of us may not realize how much flexibility has been added to our lives. We are moving into a stage in communication where business phone numbers will still be tied to physical locations, but phone numbers for individuals will be tied to their very person. A lot of families, ours included, have done away with landlines to our homes, opting for each of us to carry a cell phone.

This ability to almost always reach out and touch someone to make and change plans means that our commitments and schedules are much more fluid than that of our parents. While this is mostly a good thing it can give rise to a lessening the strength of our commitments. If I have a date to do X with someone and something I want to do more comes up it is now so much easier to bag the previous commitment, usually with very little cost in social currency. Of course, if you do this sort of thing often enough the value of your word when making commitments will suffer devaluation.

The ability to always be in contact is also a two edged sword, as many with cell phones or pagers have found out referring to them as electronic leashes. We are now tied much closer to our work and our bosses can more easily pull on that leash. We also have a harder time dodging those certain people in all our lives, be they relatives or acquaintances, that for most part we really don’t want to talk to very often.