Cell Phone Angst

Louis Rene Beres at OUPblog has a fascinating meditation on the association between use of cell phones and the anxiety and alienation in modern American culture. I can see myself a bit here, and definitely some people I know. As he points out, the cell phone is just an electronic instrument, but certainly can magnify what's going on in the people who use it. Money quote:

Perhaps half of the American adult population is literally addicted to cell phones. For them, a cell, now also offering access to an expanding host of related social networks, offers much more than suitable business contact, personal safety, or even a merely prudent ability to “stay in touch.” For these anxious legions, conversing or messaging on a cell phone grants easily accessible personal therapy. It permits both the caller and the called to feel more important, more valuable, less anonymous, and (above all else) less alone. With “rugged individualism” now reduced to a convenient national myth, cellular communication in its many forms promises to provide almost everyone who is “linked in” a direct line to stature, inclusion and happiness.

And...

Although never widely recognized, the inner fear of loneliness expressed by cell phone addiction gives rise to another huge problem. Nothing important, in science or industry or art or music or literature or medicine or philosophy, can ever take place without some loneliness. To be able to exist apart from the mass – to be tolerably separated from what Freud called the “primal horde,” or what Nietzsche termed the “herd,” or Kierkegaard the “crowd” – is actually indispensable to exceptional intellectual development, and determinative creative evolution.

I recommend the entire article...