When I saw a mobile phone commercial on TV that boasted their subscription plans to be so low even kids can own one, I knew that was it. It signaled the dawn of a new age. And I was right; it didn’t take long until it rendered the then reigning yuppy gadget known as the pager as unfashionable and obsolete. And of course in a place like Manila where trends and fads are actually considered as airborne viruses, it didn’t take long for the disease to spread like an epidemic across the metro.
But that was more than ten years ago. Today, year 2005, it is utterly unthinkable for a person (well at least in most urban areas in the Philippines) to NOT have a mobile phone of his or her own. If you don’t have a mobile phone there will only be two likely reasons for this. One, you had one and either you lost it or worse it got stolen. Or two, your name is Rip Van Winkle and you are terribly disoriented in the world that you just woke up in.
I remember how a mobile phone was so bulky it used to have a bag of it’s own so you can actually carry it around a lot easier. Today, it just overwhelms me how recent technology has pushed the envelope on getting these gadgets smaller and more beefed up with over the top features like digital cameras, mp3 players, and Internet capabilities. And ironically, practical use for photovoltaic solar panels still hasn’t really gotten beyond simple calculators and watches.
Don’t get me wrong, I love technology. I love that I don’t have to use paper as often as I used to. I love being able to edit stuff on the spot on a PC. I love the modern telecommunications industry. I love the Internet. Where were blogs when I had the luxury of time to write everything I could think of? I am a big fan of things that makes life easier. But today’s mobile phone just really doesn’t appeal to me. More so the pop culture that came along with it.
Before I go on, let me establish a few personal facts. I’m no hypocrite; I do own a mobile phone. I’ve actually owned 3 so far in a span of 4 years. The first one I had (year 2000) was a hand me down from my dad. It was a Siemens, which was probably one of the first few phones that came out the market during the early SMS era. I say that because it didn’t even have SMS caller ID, so I didn’t know who was sending me text messages. Every time people would send me an SMS message like, “I hope you are having a great day” I would suspiciously and carefully look out the window and reply, “please don’t hurt me, you will have your money by 6pm today as I promised!” My second phone (Oct 2003) was a Nokia 3315 my officemates pitched in to buy for me as a birthday present. They did that because aside from being the popular nice guy that I am, the Siemens phone I was still using couldn’t be contacted because the receiver was busted, the LCD was already flickering, the battery was held together by strips of adhesive tape, the antennae snapped off in spite my attempts to glue it back on, and the paint on the casing was about 30 percent gone. In a word it was disgraceful. The birthday phone got stolen in the office almost after a year. And a few weeks later my benevolent boss in South Dakota bought me another one just like it, which I am still using to this day.
So you see, I have never actually bought a phone in my entire life. And truth be told, I can’t see myself actually buying one with all the expenses I am juggling. I know both my wife and I have good jobs, but stealing a few thousand pesos from the already tight family budget would just hurt us so much that I would be forced to come home and have saltine crackers for dinner.
And that’s the part that really comes as an enigma to me; some people would actually and willingly endure that just so that they have the latest phone models to flash around. I actually know a few people who keep up with the mobile trends and I assure you I wouldn’t be quick to regard as them as financially able. And you see that in the streets and in the malls as well. I know face value could be such an unmerited base for judgment, but you regularly see punk assed teenagers and yuppies deliberately flaunting their mobile phones in public. Flaunting features they don’t even use. Form over function.
Again I would like to point out how I appreciate the convenience of mobile phones at times, especially during real emergencies. But sometimes I feel that it has made us soft in our promptness for appointments that its slowly undermining people’s respect for other people’s time. If people just show up on time there wouldn’t be any need to keep in touch remotely via SMS, and we would all save a ton of money on calls and text messages. The “yeah, I’ll be there” has been replaced with “dto pa lang me sa haus :-)”. Which I guess brings me to my next beef with SMS users: text shorthand.
SMS or text message shorthand was a by-product of users having to negotiate sending messages in mobile phones that had character limits. I don’t know if modern phones today still have character limits, but I swear nothing annoys me more than receiving SMS in hardcore text shorthand. Messages that read more like HTML codes than actual words. Text shorthand is nothing but a convenient excuse not to spell and write words properly. The phone I use, being a really old model still has character limitations, so if run out of characters I simply edit. For words like “nincompoop”, I settle for “stupid”, or “dull” if I’m really out of space. I write words the way they should be spelled. Half the fun is trying to trim your sentences without compromising the meaning and proper spelling. After all, isn’t that what SMS stands for, Short Message Service? When I receive long messages lazily written in text shorthand and I can’t understand it, I either reply back asking it to be rephrased or simply I ignore the message. I hate it when senders expect me to rewire my brain on how to correctly read a sentence just because it’s pop culture. That increasingly popular use of “me” in text messages really ticks me off too. You know, “wer you na, dto na me”, “papunta na me der”, “na traffic me eh”. It’s not cute! It’s nowhere near adorable. Furthermore, it’s annoying because it’s simply ridiculous to substitute the English word “me” for the Tagalog word “ako”. Isn’t it just a difference of one character if you truly are saving space? Irony: a device supposedly invented to better communication can actually be the culprit for the increasing grammar and spelling problems of today’s Filipino youth.
Mobile phones are no longer mere devices that people use to remotely communicate with. It has evolved to become a status symbol for those who fear the social stigma of being branded as un-trendy and unfashionable. It’s rites of passage for those who long to be considered part of the privileged handful of MMS users and polytone ringtones. It has become a tangible and obvious “it” to show up for when things like wit and character falls short.
The term cell phone, as we already know is short for cellular telephone. The “cell” is the actual cellular geographic zone surrounding a transmitter we refer to as the cell site. But the word cell could also be defined as a narrow confining room, a prison. And I think to some extent that describes what marketing and the cell phone pop culture has done to some of our youth (I say “youth” because it is almost a given that yuppies and social climbers will invest on anything evidently visible that could give social leverage). It has regressed written communication. And even far worse than that, it has subliminally conditioned and trapped the mind into believing that these devices grants the bearer instant membership to a social elite.
I know that I might have already raised eyebrows and offended a number of people with what I’ve written here. So if I must say something objective, I suppose everybody is entitled to his or her own happiness. And if a trendy phone you could hardly afford brings you just that then all the best! I suppose the word “afford” is in its self, relative. Personally, I just find it ironically amusing how marketing the cellular telephone to the Filipino consumer has been so effortlessly easy. When I saw Cesar Montano dressed as a construction worker in a mobile subscription ad I nearly wet my pants laughing. Never mind the low end phone that he supposedly uses in the commercial, would the advertising agency really have people believe that a big shot actor like him that had a lavish fairy tale wedding in the luxurious Coconut Palace be identified with the lower class masses? I mean, come on! It’s funny how companies have gone to extremes to make plans, payment schemes and the actual devices as ridiculously affordable as possible to a society that has bigger needs than being able to take pictures with cell phones, being alerted by polytone sounds and being able to send MMS picture messages.
But I guess that’s the way it is. That’s the reality of it. Some people are simply “outside the coverage area”. Let’s try our call again later and hope for a better signal.
