It was probably about 15-20 years ago that I was asked to arrange a speaker for my weekly Rotary meeting, and I invited in a representative of a new company to demonstrate a new technology – the cellular telephone. We were all impressed, and several of us got to try out the device that afternoon. Making calls just because we could do so now seems to be limited to those few minutes after landing when the flight attendant tells us that it’s OK to reconnect to our electronic world. But only the most prescient among our Rotary group back then could have foreseen the way cell phones would become dominant in our lives.

Somewhere in the generation gap, there was a revelation that if you want to talk to someone, it makes more sense to call a PERSON than a PLACE. And so we gradually have started to receive more and more of our calls on our cell phones as opposed to our home or office phones, except, of course, for the purpose of doing business. Over perhaps the last decade, many of us, myself included, have accepted cell calls as being not just emergency or convenient supermarket occurrences, but instead the preferred way of being contacted. I am one of those whose cell phone is always nearby, even in the middle of the night (and thank you very much to the person whose wrong number dialing caused my phone to ring in the wee hours of this morning).

Perhaps it would have been an easy call to predict that portable phones would become smaller, more efficient, and ubiquitous, but would any of us have guessed that we’d use our phones for texting and photography too? Or to surf the web and check e-mail? Or as a way to seek higher standing in the status race (gotta upgrade to that newer iPhone, right?).

I’m not convinced that talking on a cell phone while driving is any more dangerous than yelling at the kids in the back seat, but I am a little disturbed when I see people texting behind the wheel. And we all seem to be rather accepting of the deficiencies of the cell phone system – dropped calls, bad sound quality. I suspect that the prevalence of “Can you hear me now?” questions could have doomed telephone communication as a whole had it been so common when Ma Bell was starting out 100 or so years ago.

A cell phone service provider employee told me recently that they don’t make any money on the phones themselves. I don’t doubt the truth of that. But I’ve also heard that the major expense these companies face each month is not the cost of transmitting the calls, but rather in generating and distributing the invoices. Perhaps that’s why there will be growth in the use of unlimited calling plans, which many of us had on our old land lines, at least for local calls. And how long will it be before we ditch the land lines completely? Many already have done so.

I do see an irony here. Our phone service has morphed from wired to wireless, first through the use of cordless phones, and now with cellular. At the same time, our TV service has gone the other way, as only a few holdouts still rely on over-the-air reception instead of cable TV.

Of course, the cell phone boom is worldwide, and is, in fact, bringing telephone service to some regions that have never had it before. In many other countries, subscribers pay only for calls they make, not those that they receive. That is, of course, the model that our landline service used to offer, and I wonder why one of the American cell phone companies doesn’t try that as a marketing plan. It would certainly seem to be more attractive than the Favorite 5 or free calling within your network or whatever.

I suspect that my fellow Rotarians who attended that meeting many years ago would be surprised by all of this, but maybe even more so by the fact that we’ve accepted monthly phone bills in the $100-200 range, which must be ten times higher than we were used to back then. Of course, in those days, we couldn’t have those critical conversations that we all enjoy so much now: “Where are you?” “Pulling into the driveway. Let’s go.” “OK, I’ll finish texting my friend while we drive.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Al. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.