Tele is Greek for distant and phonos for sound, so telephone is a satisfactory name for the old-fashioned desk-bound beast with a receiver that lets you chat with someone many miles away. But today’s cellphone barely ever makes a phone call. It has other fish to fry and means of frying them, most of which stink. It needs a new name. I’ve got some suggestions.
The Pocket Snitch
Fifteen years ago in Dubai I met a man who worked in surveillance. And even back then he told me, "if you’ve got a phone we’ve got you."
The pocket snitch knows where you’ve been and when and what you’ve been up to online and it is constantly reporting this stuff back to whoever wants to pay for it. And whoever wants to pay for it is unlikely to have your best interests at heart. It is not a case of having nothing to fear if you’ve got nothing to hide. It’s a case of avoiding manipulation and exploitation. And to those who are eager to exploit and manipulate, your pocket snitch is their friend, not yours.
The Go-between
The phone is increasingly the thing that intercedes between its wielder and the world, the new multisensory organ.
A meal is served, a song sung, a performance performed, a game played, a celebrity chanced upon, and up goes a bristling phalanx of go-betweens to record it, their owners looking not at the thing itself, the living incident, but at the screen on which the living incident appears.
And on which it can later be reviewed, and edited, or set to music, and then transmitted to others. And thus the go-between holds life at one remove and records, as lived experiences, experiences that its owner didn’t live at all.
He merely watched them on a screen, then claimed to own them.
The Boastie-box
Come with me to the Louvre and behold the crowd in front of the Mona Lisa. They all have their backs to the painting and are taking selfies with their boastie-boxes. And five minutes later on WhatsApp, "Here I am with my back to the world’s most famous painting. How’s that for well-travelled? How’s that for cultural sophistication?"
Though quite what makes the Mona Lisa the world’s most famous painting I can’t tell you, because, if truth be told, I didn’t look at it.’
The Serendipity-eraser
We are bound by time, and time travels only in the one direction. We know the past but we can never know the future. All we can do is put one foot in front of the other and hope, because like every other creature on the planet we are subject to what happens to happen in a serendipitous world and that is its charm.
But with the Serendipity-eraser the owner can neuter the future. He can scour the road ahead, can drive along it virtually before he drives along it actually. He can hear and see what others have said before him, about this town, this restaurant, this resort, this anything.
He can see it all before he gets there, know what to think and where to go, and free himself of any risk of being thrilled or terrified or pleasantly surprised by chance. And at the same time foster the delusion that the world is safely and knowably under his control.
It isn’t. As he will discover.
The Cruelty-enhancer
A schoolgirl, 15, alone in a locked bedroom, curled in on herself. In her hand the source of her misery, the screen on which she’s read what others have just said about her, comments they would never have made face to face. The Cruelty-enhancer is a best friend to the cowardly. Some schools have banned phones: all have reported that the kids grew happy.
The Isolator
See that group ostensibly together but sitting in silence, each engrossed in their screen. It is the final irony, that phones have become such isolators. For we are a band of sorrowful searchers whose only consolation is to know that. That means sitting with friends and lovers and an abundance of wine and laughing till the rafters ring. Phones be damned.
- Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
