I have an addiction. It is shameful, dirty and causes distress of all those around me.
Yes, I have a smartphone.
Seneca Riggins
The black case is oversized, and the battery dies after the sun reaches its apex. Sometimes the phone does not ring. I will not get email updates or texts for minutes at a time—gasp, yes minutes.
This is humiliating for me, but technology has flawed me. I am an official slave to cellular waves and data plans.
I used to believe cable would be the destruction of me. I could feel my mind rotting by television talk shows and “reality TV.” But back then I could shut off the TV. I could walk away and pick up a book. Maybe it was crappy book, but it did not matter.
But now, I cannot make it through the day without looking for some sort of gratification of acknowledgement. Perhaps it is because I rarely speak to people in person these days. Perhaps it is because I spent too much money on my phone to let it go unnoticed.
But it is such a waste of my day.
My calls are usually like this, “Hey man, did you see the Jon Stewart show earlier?”
I imagine most students’ calls are all about the same. Maybe I am stereotyping here, but I really do not think I am the only one.
But I think cellphones prey on many people’s need to feel connected to the world in one form or another. It is a matter of survival at this point for a large portion of the world.
This is humiliating for me, the feeling of power and control taken away by characters and images on a screen.
In a conversation with one friend, she told me: “I texted him blah blah blah. Then he texted me back, blah blah blah.”
We don’t tell people anything anymore. We ‘texted ‘em’ and that is our replacement for human interaction.
I fear one day my ideal mate will have a large screen instead of a face. She will be a beautiful emoticon with eyes of dots. Every time I hear a ringtone, it will be a replacement for the words “I love you.”
This is humiliating to me, but if I am walking around campus looking as if I am on day three from crack addiction, it will most likely mean that I am on minute three of my radioactive cellphone wave withdrawal.
