I took off my Jawbone Up to take a shower and settled it into the charger. What I didn’t do was take it with me when I left for the airport. Now a feel like a man who just left his kid at the mall. In what felt like a week the Up became an integral part of my daily routine. I came to rely on the on the familiar buzz of inactivity every 15 minutes I sat idle. I’d even grown to believe the buzz could be of service to me on this roadtrip, prodding me to stay awake as day passed into night and the hours of mid-America highway travel grew tedious. No such luck it seems. We grow to rely on these things we carry. As one author once wrote, they come to define us, creating meaning, symbolism, even separation in our lives.
There is no question that the ubiquitous teen accessory, the cell phone, can be a window or a wall. It can open the owner to a flood of social information and contact, or they can seal themselves away behind earbuds and disappear into of a world of their own design and soundtrack. The opportunities and barriers that cell phones present have long inspired debate to their role in purpose in academia, the workplace, and even in general life. There is a presumption that these devices limit the amount f face to face contact people choose to have. I have no evidence to prove or refute the claim, nor is it my purpose. However, in a conversation about the things we carry, the cell phone is a key device. Too many of us don’t know what we would do without one, and even more are at a loss to define what meaning the device has to them personally and to the society as a whole.
We choose phones based on the features, the network, the look, the coolness points we get for having it, etc. The phones are symbols of social status.They aren’t the only ones.