Lose cell phone, get cast away from society

Are we enslaved to our cell phones?
While sudden disconnection shocks initially, it wears off and other losses emerge. Unlike address books that can be at least partly recovered, cool ring tones and sentimental text messages can sometimes be lost forever.

Cell phones "are our repositories of our lives, our loved ones,” said Salzman, the cultural trendspotter. “My friends keep SMS (text message) trails. They’re kind of like their diaries.”

Living without them is only expected to get harder as their importance grows. Far from just a phone, mobiles are also used as alarm clocks, watches, music players, cameras and calendars.

And they’re on their way to becoming full-blown mini computers, personal organizers — and gaming devices. Is our dependency on a single gadget for everything healthy?

“You become enslaved to the device,” said Leysia Palen of the University of Colorado, who researches how technology impacts society. “You’re more beholden and expect it to be our dependent brain.”

Dialing down our dependency
Losing a cell phone can help dial down our dependency — some.

Michael Bonfanti from Monticello, Fla., was so furious when he first lost his at a wedding that

Video   Time running out for the watch? March 14: More young people are looking to their cell phone to check the time. Mara Schiavocampo reports. Nightly News

he refused to buy a new one. And after a week, he started to like being without it — a lot.

“It was liberating,” he said. “Nobody could get me if I didn’t want them to.” 

Bonfanti’s wife disagreed. But he kept up his “anthropological experiment, like going back to the Stone Age,” for three weeks.

In that time, he became the office freak at his law firm, where he says colleagues are hooked on “CrackBerries,” a nickname for popular BlackBerry phones.

Bonfanti eventually acquiesced to his wife’s wish, persuaded that if something should happen

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to him, he couldn’t connect with her or she with him.

She also got him a “man bag,” a purse made for and used by men, to carry his new mobile. Bonfanti uses the man bag to subdue the phone’s ringing so he can ignore it as he pleases.

“I know it’s there. I’m not going to lose it — but I still have that freedom when I leave work,” he said. “It goes in the closet at my house.”

‘Impossible to live without it’
Despite attempts to curb cell phone use, experts say we’re permanently bound to the devices. That’s because we want — and depend on — constant contact and instant information.

“With a cell phone, once we get used to the information, whether online or talking to a person, it becomes impossible to live without it,” said Paul Levinson, author of “Cellphone: The Story of the World's Most Mobile Medium and How It Has Transformed Everything!”

Wilson’s new BlackBerry Pearl keeps track of things like her grocery list.

She is now attending her alma mater, West Virginia State University, and is surrounded by her old college friends again. Wilson never set foot in San Diego’s National University. Her lack of financial and emotional support made her time there difficult — and losing her cell phone, twice, pushed it to unbearable, she said.

“It was absolutely the worst thing that ever could have happened.”

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