Supermodernity

The private space that the cell phone is able to carry with it began with the cell phone's predecessor – the landline telephone. The structure of the cell phone as opposed to the landline telephone is what allows the private to carry into the public.

Ten years ago,  the ring-tone and the cell phone conversation were hardly a part of modern society's everyday social geography. Now,  mobile telephony has made its “presence felt in almost every region of the world” (Sadie Plant, 2000:26).

It is mobility that makes the cell phone capable of restructuring social interaction and impression management. To understand why the cell phone is capable of this,  it is important to look at the beginnings of the cell phone,  and the genesis of cell phone use.

A Technological Leash

The difference between the cell phone and the landline telephone is that the landline telephone is tethered by its cord to a single place. The telephone is limited by the length of its cord and its proximity to a phone jack. To those who had never experienced a telephone,  the device was as foreign as the Internet once was in 1993. The fact that a human could speak into a machine and hear another’s voice on the other side gives the appearance of personal schizophrenia.

Mainlining It

Over time,  the strangeness of the new dissolved into formal society and the, landline telephone became very important for the modern society it came to support.

Those living in suburban communities were less capable of reaching actual members of, society on a daily basis. The telephone helped them to socialize in the isolated spaces of, modern society.

Cordless Phones

As technology progressed, cordless telephones arrived on the communication landscape. They had a slightly larger reach, but the range of movement allotted to the, user seldom made it outside the house. The phone had to be placed back in its charging, receptacle or it would run out of power and would not ring. Those who needed a phone, while 'on-the-go' or in the city had to find a phone booth. Besides costing money,  they were public phones,  not private ones. The telephone user had to pay for ‘borrowed’ time. Because of this,  public phones were not conducive to long conversations.

Unlike the cell, phone,  the phone booth and the personal household/business telephone did offer some, sort of privacy. They were constrained to location,  and users could only carry them so far, as the cord reached. Wireless telephones offered mobility,  but were large and unwieldy, and users could not travel with them in their pockets., Although the first cell phones were heavy and awkward,  they allowed the first, adopters (generally businesspeople) the ability to talk freely while walking or doing, mobile tasks.

When un-tethered from location,  the mobile telephone was free to enter into, the public social geography. Cell phone users were capable of having mobile, conversations; conversations that could occur at any time in any place that carried a cell, phone signal.

Technosocial Freedom

Today, computation devices are no longer held to the ground by cords but have become wireless and mobile. Telephones are no longer confined to roadside booths or the office of the domestic home. The cell phone is the wireless device that ties computing, and telephony together.

In 1990, Mark Weiser proposed that:

“the future in the first decades of the 21st century wouldn't be a virtual reality in which people put themselves into virtual worlds, but the opposite, in which tiny microchips in everything, from pencils to chairs and walls will literally build computation into physical fabric of the world” (Weiser, 1990).

While microchips do not exist in everything, we carry around devices with us, making computing much more ubiquitous. Technology continues to colonize and structure the communications of an increasingly large number of people. The coffee shop I am currently sitting at is filled with the sounds of cell phone ringtones and conversations, and when I observe the tables of the coffee shop patrons,  I cannot find one that doesn't have at least one cell phone present.

It has become impossible to have a modern lifestyle that is not interrupted by the ring-tone.