I used to wonder where my intensely adverse reaction to cell phones originated. I always feel queasy when asked to handle one. Then the light went on one day as I sat in a restaurant with a friend. His cell phone rang. He interrupted our conversation to check who was calling. His face lit up and he announced it was a mutual friend. He answered the call.
I sat there wondering if I was the only person in situations like this that feel as though they are there to fill the time until something better comes along. I remember one lunch with a friend whose daughter was away on a class trip. She put her cell phone on the table and spent the entire lunch text messaging her daughter such important information as, “Yes, the redwoods are magnificent.” I wondered how her daughter had time to see trees if she was so busy text messaging.
So I sat there as my friend laughed and talked on his phone until he handed it to me. I said hi and then listened to an update of my friend’s life. I was paralyzed when it was my turn to talk. Suddenly I was hyper aware of everyone around me. It was as though I was in one of those dreams where you look down and realize you forgot to get dressed before going to your meeting.
I am perfectly comfortable carrying on a conversation with the person sitting across from me in a public place. So why am I freaked at the idea of a cell phone conversation in the same surroundings?
It took a few minutes for me to realize that when you talk into your cell phone, you can’t lower your voice or lean forward so that you have some privacy. You can’t talk quietly if you are going to be heard through the general noise of the public area surrounding you. You are, in fact, totally naked in that everyone can hear what you say because you have to say it so loudly.
I grew up when there was a clear delineation between public and private areas of life. Now I find myself in a world where that line seems to have been completely erased. The government can make communications companies turn over my records to them without a court order; people post videos on the Internet for the world to see that I would not share with my spouse in the privacy of our bedroom; and conversations about life, kids, love and sex happen all around you despite the fact that you don’t know any of the people involved.
I honestly don’t think those teens in Florida who beat up a classmate in order to post the video on the Internet and become famous did so only because they were inured to violence but also because they have no concept of privacy. If beating someone up is what it takes to become famous, then beat away and post it. Apparently even crimes are not carried out privately anymore.
Celebrities post videos of themselves having sex. Politicians enumerate their dalliances at press conferences. People sit in airports having phone conversations in public that I would blush to have in private. And suddenly my mother’s words ring loudly in my ears, words she spoke as the sixties tore down all levels of formality and made it ok to go to church in pants with no hat. “Is nothing sacred anymore?”
Unfortunately, the answer seems to be no. You can no longer expect basic courtesy when visiting friends. You can only hope that when their cell phone rings it doesn’t turn out to be someone with whom they’d prefer to be speaking. You can no longer expect privacy. Between the government and the cookies that track your every move on the Internet, there is absolutely nothing that is not known about you. From you sex habits to your buying preferences, we no longer have any zone of privacy.
Personally, I could have lived and died very happy without ever knowing that the new medicine was working better for the stranger sitting behind me at lunch the other day. I am apparently in an ever shrinking minority with that thinking.