Digiwonder?

In 1999, I left my hometown of Pittsburgh to go to Slovakia for the Peace Corps. At home cell phone users were still considered snobs– often stereotyped as rude, self-inflated business people yakking away at the most inappropriate of times.

My then 96 year-old-grandmother had a neighbor, a young, single lawyer, who fit the bill. If he wasn’t gabbing on his cell in the shared backyard behind their houses, he was always leaving his trashcan in front of her section of the front lawn. When he refused to put his can elsewhere, she clipped an article from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette about cell phone users being snobs and sent it to him. “P.S.,” she wrote at the bottom, “I’m not a fan of your trash can.”

So you can imagine my surprise when I landed in Slovakia– a still developing Eastern European country– and found that everyone had cell phones. And it was in the Peace Corps that I got my first went mobile.

The thing was huge– a used phone I borrowed from some co-workers. But it was my only phone and I LOVED it. I couldn’t imagine not having it. Suddenly it was so easy to meet up with friends and make plans. And like all Slovaks, I quickly became a text-messaging pro. It was cheaper than a phone call, although reading and writing in Slovak was sometimes challenging.

Two-and-a-half years later, when I returned home to the States, I was surprised again. Americans were buying cell phones in droves. And gone was the stigma that cell users were stuck-up and rude. It was fascinating to me to compare adoption in Europe to the States. In Slovakia, cell phones were cheaper than land lines. Text messaging was cheaper than calling. So everyone had cells and everyone used SMS. But in the US, it was clear that people were warming up to cell phones due to their convenience and peace of mind. And rarely did people ditch their land line.
America’s growing love affair with the cell phone has no end in site. A recent Pew Internet study noted that we sometimes resent our little phone friends. We don’t like that people can reach us more easily than ever before and we often lie to folks about where we are when we’re on our cells! But we put those annoyances aside easily and more and more, we don’t want to be without our phones. In fact, the study revealed that most people want to have more features on their phones. Especially when it comes to maps, the Internet and email. As the study said, we’re looking to have a “communications Swiss army knife.”

No doubt, we’ll have all of this. In fact, we won’t even have “phones” for much longer. We’ll have handhelds that do it all. Life Pilots.

One side-effect that I do like about the mobile world. I feel like it’s bringing a little social spontaneity of the old days back to society. People make plans on the fly and agree to meet each other on the spot.

If only Grammy could see us now.