Let freedom from cellphones ring and ring

T here is a famous story about Samuel Taylor Coleridge, author of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” He was writing a different poem, which began, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree.” He was interrupted by a knock at the door. This was an age before telephones. Someone was delivering a message. When Coleridge got back to his poem, he had lost his inspiration. His poetic mood had been utterly shattered by the knock on his door. “In Xanadu” would never be more than a glittering, tantalizing fragment.

This story also has it that Coleridge was under the influence of opium when writing “Kubla Khan,” but that is beside the point. What is crucial about this story is how an unexpected communication can blast to oblivion a private, important thought – indeed, any plan, idea or dream that we may be entertaining inside of our heads. Which brings us to the cell phone.

The most common complaint about cell phones is that people talk on them to the exclusion or intrusion of other people around them. The loud voice wafting over from another table at a restaurant intrudes on our conversation. Worse, if I’m having an in-person conversation with you, and you receive a call on your cell phone and smile me off while you talk on the phone, what am I, chopped liver?

And worse than that, if I’m having an in-person conversation with you, and I receive a call on my cell phone, and it distracts me from our conversation, I may lose even more – the crucial point I was just about to convey to you.

In all of these situations, the cell phone bullies us out of other communications. Actually, long before cell phones, the telephone regularly trumped all other activities in the home. Not only would television shows and conversations with family members almost always yield to the ring of the phone, so would love-making (media theorists called this “telephonus interruptus”).

The appeal of the ringing phone, especially in an age before caller ID, was that the call could always be from the personal or business relationship we most wanted to hear from, even though it was usually from an in-law or someone seeking a contribution.

But these cases may not be the worst that the cell phone can mete out to our psyches. Far more damaging than an interrupted dinner conversation or other act of communication may be the cell phone’s disruption of our most private, inner thoughts. When the cell phone rings and we are alone, it can barge into and pre-empt the essential time we each need to spend in the company of our own minds. What can we do to defend against these kinds of jangling intrusions, as well as the more superficial paper cuts of cell-phonic culture?

We have already entered a golden age of the little white lie, courtesy of our cell phone, and this is by and large a healthy, protective development. “I didn’t hear it ring,” “I must’ve been in a pocket without service,” “I didn’t realize my phone had shut off” are among the more common fibs all of us tell from time to time, all in the noble service of carving out some time and space in our lives in which we’re beyond reach.

The notion of being unreachable is not alien to human life, after all – we have “Do Not Disturb” signs on the doors of hotel rooms, and most people would never dream of calling most other people in the middle of the night. So why must we work so hard to carve out some unbreachable time for ourselves when it comes to cell phones? Why must we apologize if we have indeed decided to shut off our cell phone for a while?

The problem is that we come from a millenniums-old, deeply embedded tradition of long-distance communication scarcity. For as long as there have been human beings on this planet, and right up until the recent mass deployment of cell phones, it has been easy to communicate with someone right next to us, or a few feet away, and difficult to do the same with someone across the town, country or globe. This meant that we have been socially bred to welcome any communication from afar.

Whether codices delivered by breathless couriers in Roman times, telegrams delivered by bright kids in uniforms in Victorian times or just a phone call throughout much of the 20th century, such missives from far away were seen as gifts or miracles, if not always welcome, certainly events to make time for. Like Pavlov’s dogs, we jumped at the ring, and still do.

But the cell phone, bringing its own kind of miracle, has made long-distance communication common, and time by ourselves an endangered species. Now time alone, or a conversation with someone right next to us which cannot be interrupted by a cell phone, is something to be cherished. The state of being removed from or beyond all possible communication has come under siege. Even avid devotees of the cell phone – myself usually included – are tempted at times to throw it away, or curse the day it was ever invented.

But we don’t, and we won’t, and there really is no need to. All that is required to reclaim our private time is a general social recognition that we are entitled to it. I’ve noticed, among people in their teens and 20s who use cell phones, that this is already coming to be. While not completely comfortable ignoring a ringing cell phone, kids seem much less concerned about offending an unwanted caller by not answering than do older adults. This is likely because, for someone born into the cell phone age, calls are as commonplace as talk and thoughts.

In other words, we have to develop a healthy contempt, or at least skepticism, for the ring of our own cell phone. Given the ease of making and receiving cell phone calls, if we don’t talk to the caller right now, we surely will shortly later. The unrequited caller is usually traceable, and likely to leave a message, if the call is important.

In an age of omniaccessibility, the cell phone call deserves no greater priority than a random word to the person next to us, or a stray, intriguing thought. Though the call on my cell phone may be the one-in-a-million from Steven Spielberg – who has finally read one of my science fiction novels and wants to make it into his next movie – it is likely not, and I’m better off thinking about that idea I just had for a new story, or the slice of pizza I’ll eat for lunch.