Phoning

I WAS ELEVEN YEARS OLD when I was mesmerized by the hit new TV show, Star Trek, starring William Shatner, in 1966. The technology and special effects, which seem to quaint and primitive today, amazed and inspired me. Photon torpedos, tricorders,transporters, and,a bove all others,communicators caught my attention and imagination.I wanted to have a communicator.We got walkie talkies for Christas about the same year, and they were wonderful, but, somehow, not quite the same. Telephones in 1966 were big, bulky black boxes which were immobile, and when they rang, either you answered the phone, or you had no idea who just called. A cell phone was an idea from the far future, pure science fiction. Many years later, the man who invented and patented the design for the first cell phone said that he got his inspiration from the communicator devices on Star Trek; I am not alone in my admiration of Trek tech. That little chirping sound that communicators made when calling out or receiving a call were particularly appealing to me. About three decades later actual cell phone made their appearance; I first become aware of them in te early to mid nineteen nineties,but by that time I was pushing forty,and evidently the magic had worn off. I recall listening to talk radio shows, and it seemed that everytime somebody called the show using a cell phone, they were given special treatment, moved to the head of the caller list, because in those days, when using a cell phone, you never knew when you were going to lose contact, ending the conversation, especially if you were calling while driving, which, it seemed, everybody was doing.I still recall that throughout the decade of the nineties it seemed as if most people driving a car were simultaneously talking on a cell phone, on purpose, as if to convey an impression of wealth and social status. I was unimpressed. I didn't even bother to get my first cell phone until I was fifty, in 2005. For a few weeks, until I grew up, I may have been guilty of doing some driving and talking of my own. I got my first smart phone, I think its actually an "I Phone", earlier this year, a few months ago, at the belated age of sixty eight. Rarely does it leave the house with me, I don't send or receive text messages nor take pictures of my lunch to post on Facebook, and I never look at the thing for more than a few seconds at a time, two or three times a day. Had I been among the first in line, back in 2007, to get one of Steve Job's internet phones, who knows? I might have gotten smart phone started at a more impressionable time of my life, and might, to this very day, be walking around like a zombie, hours every day, the phone a few inches in front of my face,my eyes glued to the screen, hour, after hour...I like to think not, but, again, you never know. As far as I can tell, many people still do that, especially the young and the restless. There will probably come a time when smart phones are so ubiquitous, so common, that people stop getting addicted to them. We can hope. During the last decade more than five hundred journalists, world wide, have been murdered. Journailsits by nature are often adventure seeking risk takers, and end up in dangerous places covering and reporting on controversial stories involving powerful people, who are not always scrupulous. A nosy journalist can get in the way. become a problem to be eliminated. Journalists also frequently report that their phones often do things on their own, without any propting or action at all by their owner, as if they are reciving commands and instructions from an unknown source. Wealthy, powerful people, sometimes the employeers of journalists, often find it beneficial to find out exactly what communication is taking place on the journalist's phone. People, ordinary citizens, often tell me that the very moment they show interest or express interest in some consumer prodcut, they receive an ad for the product on their computer, or smart phone. That seems spooky to me, because I suspect that something similar has happened to me. If and when I can say for certain that it is happening, I might toss my smart phone in the garbage, and run like hell. I'm not so sure all this technology is as wonderful as it was cracked up to be when I was a child, longing for it.