Cells and Cigs

The cell phone, that nifty digital clamshell, has conquered campus. Where once you permanently stowed it in the AC-adapter cradle for the weekly dime-a-minute long-distance call to your parents, now you clip it to a belt, velcro it to a bookbag or carry it like a baton in the loneliest long-distance relay.

Surely enough, cultural critics have trumpeted the detrimental impact of the cell phone on society. Are we not disingenuous hedons, appropriating a gadget with the pretext of boosting efficiency, when in fact we use that technology for useless chit-chat? Even the most avid cell phone apologists concede that this is a rhetorical question. Of course cell phones are mostly frivolous and only occasionally useful. Ultimately, users argue, the cell phone is a benign force, and on the rare occasion that it seems absolutely necessary (“Where are you, I’m outside Mather”; “Honey, I’m on my way home, what kind of take out do you want”), well, lucky me for having mine turned on.

A new Human Nature study entitled “Mobile Phones as Lekking Devices Among Human Males,” suggests that cell phones also serve as male props for a theatrical New Economy mating game. (A “lek” is, in nature, an area where males convene to strut and females come to judge potential mates.) Researchers from the University of Liverpool observed that men in trendy pubs fidgeted with their phones periodically, removed them from jacket pockets to examine the LED-screen, checked messages though they had not received a call, verified the battery life, and laid them on the bar for all to see. This cell-strutting-phenomenon, say researchers, dovetails with the cell phone industry’s unceasing imperative to produce phones with complex and vanishingly useful features—set your ring as the “Mission: Impossible” theme—just so its customers can claim to have the latest peripheral bell-and-whistle.

Furthermore, The New York Times reported last year that South American clubs that required customers to check cell phones at the door had made a shocking, hilarious discovery: “a huge percentage” of the phones, it turned out, were fake. False social badges. Empty shells.

Isn’t there something familiar about this phenomenon?

Indeed, the cell phone’s current moment bears an uncanny resemblance to the former situation of cigarettes. Consider the similarities. Cell phones and cigarettes (1) are annoying to non-users; (2) require users to huddle out-of-doors; (3) are addictive; (4) are the result of social pressures; (5) are a means of connecting with others (“Can I bum a cig?” or “You wanna go have a smoke and talk?”); (6) engender constant fiddling; (7) are more convenient versions of an existing technology (pipe is to cigarette as landline is to cell phone); and (8) are incongruous luxuries for Third World inhabitants, often at the expense of basic necessities. Indeed, where Humphrey Bogart once stumped for “Turf” cigarettes, now Pierce Brosnan’s 007 testifies that he only uses an Eriksson phone to connect with Moneypenny.

The stories of the cell and the cig also have eerily similar narrative arcs. The cigarette began as a convenient tobacco vehicle for soldiers in World War I—soldiers who might not live long enough to fix themselves a pipe. After the war, the cigarette quickly evolved into a dainty feminine article to be held aloft by society ladies during two-cheeked kisses and a brooding device for suave anti-social heroes. The early incarnation of the cell phone was an unsexy anvil-sized apparatus for doctors and moguls. Now the base has expanded to include gabby soccer moms, malcontent teenagers and, well, just about everybody.

But the most compelling evidence that cell phones inhabit the social and cultural locus that cigarettes once did is that, quite literally, one has replaced the other. While cigarettes have fallen into relative disuse, cell phones in the U.S alone have risen from 16 million users in 1994 to 110 million users in 2000. Indeed, a study in the British Medical Journal reports that declines in smoking are concomitant with the rise in cell phones. This seems intuitive given their mutually exclusive cost, that they both occupy the hands, etc. The researchers also note rather wittily that “both objects satisfy a pubertal desire to appear mature, worldly, involved, indifferent, rebellious, ambitious, autonomous, fashionable and fully peer-bonded.”

Here I invoke the inexpressive but useful axiom that history repeats itself. Many of the fashionable and peer-bonded teens who blithely smoked their Pall Malls in the ’50s have since succumbed to emphysema. And there are other studies, too numerous to cite, which indicate one final, fatal similarity: cells and cigs are both carcinogenic. In the same way that, in 1954, cigarette companies formed the Tobacco Industry Research Committee to scrutinize the effects of cigarettes, so now are wireless companies commissioning similar studies on cell phones. Just as a hacking cough is today the sign of a misspent, rebellious youth, so will that tell-tale tumor behind your neck a half-century from now be the sign of a college career spent huddled outside the brick-and-ivy, talking loudly into your cell phone to be heard over the din of everyone else doing the same.

Couper Samuelson ’02 is a history and literature and French studies concentrator in Kirkland House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.