The decade in review pieces have begun to crop up, but there’s one reminiscing topic I’ve yet to see, and which I don’t think I am going to see: cell phones. My sneaking suspicion is that most of the people writing the decade in review pieces had a cell long before the calendar turned over to triple zeros and don’t really think of it as a last-ten-years kind of development. But it wasn’t until the beginning of this decade that those little things became utterly commonplace. Of all the changes in the past ten years perhaps nothing has affected the way ordinary Americans live their lives more than cell technology.
At the beginning of the decade cell phones were still basically a luxury item. Having one no longer meant that a person was a movie star or a drug dealer, but it wasn’t yet uncommon for someone not to have one. Neither the phones nor the plans were cheap and the quality of the calls was awful. There were “roaming” charges (remember those?) if you tried to use it more than about fifty miles from home. And even the most expensive plans generally had minute restrictions that were extremely tight. In short, it wasn’t yet something that many people could use as their primary telephone.
Of course, even that last word – telephone – is becoming something of an anachronism. Now a telephone call is just one of a wide range of communication techniques that can be performed from just about anywhere. With more and more cellular devices offering full internet access (and with the ever increasing variety of ingenious ways engineers have created to allow a tiny device an almost PC-level of control) the dream of having everything on the go is within reach. (Whether or not that’s a good thing is a discussion for another time.)
It can be almost difficult to remember now, but there was life before cell phones. Families at amusement parks had to set a place and time to meet rather than just arrange something as the day developed. Car crash victims might lie on deserted roads until someone got to a phone and called the authorities. Even the simple act of having a conversation with someone out of town was a serious commitment as long distance charges (remember those?) were nothing to sneeze at. All that’s gone. Pizza can be ordered on your way home from the movie. Lunch arrangements can be changed on the fly. Talking with someone on the other side of the country is routine and unremarkable. At the store and wondering which item to purchase? Call it in.
Cell phones have become ubiquitous. Not that long ago being able to communicate from anywhere was the stuff of science fiction, now it’s an (almost) indispensible part of modern life. And their true power only began to be realized once almost everyone had one. Everyone being accessible from anywhere is perhaps the biggest change in the way day to day life is conducted since . . . what? The automobile maybe? It’s that level of societal change. And it happened in almost the blink of an eye.
None of this is news. And in 2019 we’ll look on even the smartest of today’s “smart” phones as laughably primitive. But a fundamental aspect of our lives has changed and it happened so quickly we rarely ever talk about it. Seems worth mentioning, though.
