I used to walk around with one of these:
This was 1989 or so, and I was freelancing, and needed to be available to clients. Or so I told myself, and indeed I got calls on it from actual, paying clients. (I have the same number thirty-five years later. What I no longer have is a house phone. Though if I did, I’d probably use the breathy “Get out” from The Amityville Horror as my voicemail message. Because, you know, it’s a house phone, and there aren’t a lot of talking houses, and…. Anyway, I don’t have a house phone, so it doesn’t matter.)
That old phone did exactly three things: It made calls, it received calls, and it dropped calls. Or maybe four things, because it made my arm tired from carrying it around.
I just spent three weeks in Europe connected to the e-world with only a cell phone. (Not that one.) No computer, just a Pixel phone, a Bluetooth keyboard, and a small plastic stand so I could write on the plane and in cafes. And of course, every single person around me also had a similar cell phone, though few with a keyboard. And they spent most of their time… looking at the phone.
I don’t get it. We’re looking out over Bergen harbor from a thousand-foot hill in the city, and people are all on their phones. On the ferry in Oslo fjord, and people are on their phones. Edinburgh Castle, and…. I get taking pictures, and sort of get selfies, but most of them were… doing the exact same stuff they would do at home, except they were paying a lot of money to do it somewhere that’s not-home. (How do I know? I’m a writer, which means I’m an inveterate snoop. It’s part of the job.)
Go to the Munch Museum, and people are bumbling around in front of The Scream looking down at their phones. And that’s the one painting everyone knows. (Okay, the four paintings everyone knows, plus a couple of surviving lithographs.) In the other galleries, it was phones, phones, “Oh, yeah, that’s a painting, isn’t it, and can you believe how weird this guy was,” and phones.
The phone, incidentally, was mostly sufficient. It was fine as a writing platform, in fact, and I’ve used it before in that matter. Wayfinding (as in Google Maps) was okay, as was its ability to hold tickets for various attractions and transportation. And of course it functioned as a decent camera, at one-tenth the weight and one-hundredth of the awkwardness of my SLR.
We even took a few selfies.
Couldn’t have done that with Ye Olde Motorola Bricke.
By the way, Munch was an amazing artist who did a bit of everything, most of it rather well… including a couple of very witty sendups of van Gogh, The Starry Night and one of the olive-tree series. Here’s Munch’s Starry Night.
I couldn’t find an online version of the other. Guess I should have taken a picture with my phone.