I am not a big lover of technology, and yet it creeps into my life nonetheless. When I have tried to leave it out of my life, I have failed. I was one of the last of my friends to buy into the email phenomena, but now I’m hooked. On the other hand, when I have tried to incorporate technology into my life, I have also failed. The CD burner that my brother installed on my computer is never used. So when I think about cell phones, I am ambivalent and undecided. Should I have one, should I not have one — I’m just not sure.

I really hated cell phones when they first came out. Women walking through the grocery store talking on cell phones truly annoyed me. Men cutting in and out of traffic on the interstate with one arm on the wheel and the other clutching a phone scared me. I started dividing the world into those who owned cell phones and those who didn’t. I sided with those who didn’t, and I stayed there for a while.

My mother, a self-proclaimed addict of the evening “news” programs such as 20/20, recorded a piece on the possibility of cell phones causing brain cancer, and she showed the program to me, tracing with her forefinger on the side of my head how the tumor would extend just there — where the phone’s antenna would be. Thinking about my brain and thinking about cancer, I was even happier that I didn’t have a cell phone.

I could see how dependent people became on their phones, and how disturbed they would be if they weren’t always within reach. When guests would stay at the cabins my husband and I own in the Nantahala Gorge, they would be alternately furious and frightened when they realized their cell phones wouldn’t pick up a signal. It was interesting to observe their reactions. I couldn’t understand why professionals would want to have people from the office calling them while they were on vacation, and their anger often amused me. Yet what was truly interesting was the fear that emanated from people who were suddenly cut off. It was as they were suddenly forgotten, lost, and down a dark hole with no rope to climb out.

But despite the techno-trendy, somewhat-too-in-touch, shut-up-and-drive attitude I held towards cell phones and those who used them, I secretly remained curious, almost in awe, of the phenomenon. What would it be like, I wondered, to always be able to reach out and touch someone? To always be able to be touched?

At Christmas several years ago, my husband surprised me with a cell phone — a gift as much for himself as for me, since he worried about me during my weekly late night drive home from Franklin, where I was teaching a night class. Suddenly I had switched sides. The world had caught up with me, even if I hadn’t caught up with it.

My cell phone experience didn’t last very long. I soon learned that the phone got absolutely no signal along the winding dirt Needmore Road that runs along the Little Tennessee River. The funny thing is that I had never worried about being out there alone at night until the phone failed to work. The phone at my side had been a tease, a false sense of security, that only served to remind me in its ineffectiveness of all the things I should be afraid of as my car cautiously rolled curve after curve toward home.

And honestly, it wasn’t just the lack of reception that curtailed my brief affair with technology. It was the extra effort the convenience required. If I managed to get the phone to my purse, I left it there until the battery died. If I remembered to charge it, I forgot to put it back in my purse. After a few months of that, I concluded the phone was more trouble than it was worth, and it now lives buried somewhere in the back of my junk drawer where it can do me little good and no harm.

But still I wonder. Was I too quick to judge? Was I too lazy to charge the phone? When I started school again at the University of Tennessee, busy booths of competing cell phone companies swarmed the grounds surrounding the University Center. Several companies emphasized the safety of having a cell phone, and I sat down and watched countless young women eagerly signing up for our era’s version of a lady’s pistol.

A campus like UT is notoriously a dangerous place for women. Two women have already raped in the first few weeks of school this semester. Emails quickly circulated telling women how to defend themselves — each unabashedly criticizing women who don’t carry cell phones. One went as far to say, “If you don’t have a cell phone, shame on you!” As a woman, was I being irresponsible by not having one?

It is this sense of blanketing safety that keeps bringing me back to consider signing up for cell phone service again, a sense of safety from not being alone that I along with the rest of our country craves. I remember listening fascinated during the Columbine shootings to the account of the student who had called 911 from a classroom while the killers were still stalking the school. And now, the calls that came from the doomed flights of Sept. 11 haunt my imagination. A last phone call to say “I love you” seems priceless — ironically quite different than the materialistic image of yuppies in BMWs that cell phones had once cultivated in me.

I decided to look into getting a new phone and signing up again for service. I looked into all of the different providers, and, as fate would have it, none could offer me consistent service from Knoxville to North Carolina. One salesman explained that I’d either lose the signal through the gorge on 1I-40 or through the national park.

“They won’t let us put up towers in the park,” he told me. “Wonder why?” I laughed sarcastically. He didn’t seem amused. After weighing the pros and cons again, I walked away without a phone.

I visited my parents in Tennessee this last weekend and couldn’t help but stare for a while at the enormous cell tower that now interrupts their view of the mountains, planted in the middle of the field that surrounds their country suburb. The tower is obnoxious in its ugliness, and I hate it, but then again, when driving my 11-year-old car late at night, I don’t like feeling alone either.

I keep thinking that, if necessary, I’ll send my emergency calls and last “I love you’s” via some telepathic spiritual network that doesn’t need monumental towers of metal to work, but I look at cell phones and cell phone advertisements differently today than I did a few years ago. They aren’t evil, just bothersome. At least for now, I’ll remain without, waiting to catch up to technology and wishing that I won’t have to.

(Esther Godfrey lives in Swain County and teaches college English while working toward her PhD. She can be reached at egodfrey@utk.edu)

 

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