Cell phone Culture: Can You Hear Me Now?

I lost my cell phone a couple of weeks ago, ashamed as I am to admit it, but after cleaning the entire house twice and still not finding it, I think I am glad that it's gone.
##CONTINUE##
When I bought it a couple of years ago, I used it initially as an "emergency" tool, only turning it on when I had a flat tire or dead battery.

But of course, knowing that it was there, languishing in the glove box when I had to make an important, snap decision (like whether or not to stop for soy milk), I eventually began to use it more and more.

As I began to depend on it at every mundane turn of thought, it became an integral part of me.

It wasn't until after I lost it that I became aware of just how silly I looked and felt with this electronic extension of my personality attached to my hip.

I used to be a luddite, like just about everybody who didn't have a phone yet, and nearly daily I groused about the numbskulls on the road who would miss traffic greens because they were too busy gesticulating to someone in the ether, vastly more important than the other motorists behind him.

According to a government survey, there are at least 163 million cell phone users in this country.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration claims that at any given moment during the day, about 3 percent, or nearly 5 million of those people are driving while talking on their phones.

If we think that the cell phone is reaching saturation here in this country, we should consider Japan, with a population of 130 million; the ubiquity of the 3-watt devices is in excess of 80 million.

Equipped with digital video, Internet access and text messaging capability, this mobile phone culture, or "keitai culture" is so popular that websites devoted strictly to cell access have popped up.

From an article in "Wired" magazine about cell phones and spirituality is this:

"In China, people burn paper effigies of material goods, including mobile phones, to ensure their dead relatives are fairing well in their parallel lives. While last year one might have burned a basic phone, this year's offering will be a camera phone with color screen.

On a recent field trip around Asia, Genevieve Bell, senior researcher at Intel, saw people getting their mobile phones blessed by a Buddhist monk.

'Because they are wearing them on their bodies, they didn't want them to be bad for them,' she says."

Today, in our own country you will see them virtually everywhere, on everyone in the city.

And the new, hot market meant to bolster cell phone sales is children between the ages 8 to 12, or "tweens."

It is no longer unheard of to find young children dialing home from the schoolyard, and a number of companies, like Mattel and Disney are offering kid-friendly mobile phones with emergency only functions and with a global positioning locator feature.

This sounds good on the surface, but Dr. Henry Lai, a bioengineering professor at the University of Washington suggests that electromagnetic radiation emitted from cell phones may damage DNA and cause benign brain tumors.

In a white paper Dr. Lai presented in 1998 at a conference at the University of Vienna, Austria, studies he conducted showed microwave radiation from mobiles caused genetic damage similar to that found in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's sufferers.

While he admits that "not enough research data is available to conclude whether exposure to RFR (Radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation) during the normal use of cellular telephones could lead to any hazardous health effect," according to a story in the London Times, Dr. Lai said, "They are asking me to change my whole interpretation of the findings in a way that would make them more favorable to the mobile phone industry. This is what happened in the tobacco industry. They had data in their hands but when it was not favorable they did not want to disclose it."

Ultimately, Lai finishes by saying, "It is difficult to deny that RFR at low intensity can affect the nervous system."

But radio frequency technology experts agree that there is evidence that effects of electromagnetic energies are cumulative and that exposing children to any unnecessary radiation, in any form is a bad idea.

Another of the latest permutations of cell phone is the totally hands free device that attaches to your head above your ear like an electronic leech.

It's a little disconcerting to see someone with one of these, chattering to some disembodied entity, but appearing to be talking to themselves.

To borrow a Star Trekism, they seem fully in the first stages of becoming "Borg."

Call me a born again luddite, but out of fear of being assimilated, I'll just stick with the old landline for a while.

-----------------------------
BY Scott Anthony
Source：Robinson Newspapers