March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Cell-phone culture price of progress

It was the same train I’d known most of my life, the old commuter run clattering its familiar rhythms between Trenton (N.J) and New York City. Or so it seemed at first.

At Penn Station, the holiday crowd swarmed the stairway leading to platform one — a mass of exhausted daytrippers loaded down with gift bundles, old folks with their shuffling gait and worried eyes, and agitated businesspeople sprinting with briefcases to put Manhattan’s towers behind them for bedroom communities all down the line.

On this day before New Year’s Eve, the city’s energy, which slammed into our chests as we first hit the streets at noon, had all but bludgeoned us senseless by sunset. It pulsed along every bustling avenue, crackled through the blizzard of holiday lights, and surged like a charge of pure adrenalin through the gawking mobs.

Around Times Square, under the gaze of TV cameras from around the world, the city was barricading whole blocks to contain the next day’s New Year’s revelers, and sealing manhole covers against madmen who might be hunting for a place to hide their millennium bombs.

The end-of-the-world ranters were everywhere, too, shrieking about an Armageddon 2000 over the traffic din and the cacophonous wail of street vendors and musicians. One man, in long hair, beard, white robe and sandals, carried a full-sized plywood crucifix on his shoulder as he urged us all to repent. The sea of people merely parted as it neared him, coursed around both sides of the ludicrous young prophet, then flowed back together seamlessly.

Finally, after a long day, this grimy, beautiful, exhausting and exhilarating mess of a city was a good place to be riding away from.

On the crowded train I thought of my father, who had traveled this route to Manhattan and back home to New Jersey every weekday for more than 25 years. For him, the train had always been a kind of rolling decompression chamber, where, for 50 minutes, he could close his eyes and let the city’s chaos drain from his head. Yet in the 12 short years since his death, the cell-phone culture has changed his slumbering train in ways he could not have anticipated and almost certainly would have resented.

His fellow passengers, who once dozed, worked crossword puzzles, read the sports pages or talked quietly among themselves, now could not seem to let go for even a minute.

On the streets, I could smile at the sight of all those people with their hands glued to the sides of their heads and their mouths in nonstop motion. On the train, however, I was suddenly felt like a prisoner in everyone else’s mobile office and living room.

Before we’d even left the city, six separate cell phones in my immediate vicinity were hurriedly snapped into action. The callers all seemed desperate to reach someone, anyone they could talk to immediately. When they couldn’t connect, they stared at their tiny handsets hopelessly.

The middle-aged woman to my left punched her buttons furiously, then yammered loudly to one person about her shopping day before dialing another.

“OK, call me back!” she yelled over the squealing train wheels. Then she dropped the phone into her lap and looked at it until it rang again.

“I said I’m on the train, dammit!” barked the business-suited man beside her, who had whipped his phone out of a nifty little holster on his belt the instant he sat down. “Would you please just listen to me?”

Behind him, two young men sporting hilariously baggy clothes and two colorful cell phones were sprawled across the seat as they yakked endlessly to their friends.

“Yo, yo, baby, don’t be sayin’ that s— to me,” one of them pouted loudly, as if the magical little device in his hand had somehow transported him from this public train to his very own couch at home.

For the rest of the trip, phones beeped and chirped continually up and down the rows. No one bothered to converse in private tones; the old rules were gone. They talked unabashedly about business deals and personal matters. They cooed and sputtered and guffawed as if they were truly alone, connecting only with whom they chose while disconnecting from everyone else through their handheld cocoons.

And in this brave new technological world that is our future, they call it progress.


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