ERIN LEWIS/YH

Hey mobile phonophiles, three's a crowd

Now, don't get the wrong idea—I have nothing against modern technology. But there's something about mobile phones that gives me the creeps. It's not the fact that the kid sitting next to me in class was able to talk to his roommate on the phone while Spence was droning on about salt that bothered me so much as the fact that he would want to. I mean, this kid wasn't exactly confronting an emergency—judging from the side of the conversation I could hear, his roommate had lost his sock or something, which in my book, is even less interesting than how much salt cost in 17th century China. And yet the kid didn't seem to think that this was an inappropriate time to discuss socks, nor did he seem annoyed that his friend had called him in the middle of class. "Yeah man," he said just as loudly. "That sucks."

This fascination with talking on the phone when you're supposed to be sitting quietly is perhaps only outdone by the fascination people have with talking on the phone when they're supposed to be walking down the street. This phenomenon reaches a low point when the person feels compelled to describe to his mobile phone exactly what he sees as he's walking, as if giving a guided tour to a blind man. "Yeah, I'm taking a walk—I'm crossing the street. It's starting to snow," a girl said last week as she crossed the street and it started to snow. "Oops, I just walked right into someone," she said as she walked right into me. Once I regained my balance, I noticed that the snow reflected in the street lights was quite beautiful. But the girl was too busy telling her phone that she was putting on her gloves to notice or care—in the spirit of those people who videotape their entire vacations rather than experiencing them, she was more interested in narrating her walk than she was in taking it.

And if classes and walking to them don't provide you with enough opportunities to use your mobile phone, you can always move to Finland. According to a recent episode of 60 Minutes, in Finland you can dial a certain number on your mobile phone in a cafeteria, and a bag of chips will come out of the snack machine. You can program your phone to play "Minuet in G" when your mom calls and "Baby One More Time," when your boyfriend calls. In Finland, 12-year-old girls walk around like zombies for entire days without ever taking their ears out of their designer pink phones.

The reporter who toured Finland seemed disturbed at these developments—and not because an entire country had become so enamored with its own technology that it was possible to subsist electronically for weeks without ever hanging up. No, he seemed troubled because there were people in the United States who still dared to go to class or take a train without even bringing a phone along.

What the reporter seemed to be ignoring was that, in an age when everything that happens to us can be instantly communicated across the world as soon as it's happened, we are in serious danger of forgetting to notice that it's happening in the first place. Technology is pretty neat, but 17th century Chinese salt merchants can be neat too—if you're willing to wait for half an hour before calling your roommate to tell him to buy a new sock.

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