Copy
View this email in your browser

Who Says Flip Phones Aren't Cool? 

I was in high school when most of my friends started getting cell phones. In true overly protective father form, my sister and I weren’t allowed to join the trend. Since television and instant messenger were also not allowed in our home, we were used to being out of the cultural flow with our schoolmates. Still, it rattled me to not be allowed the coolest gadget of our time—a telephonic device to carry on your person! No more waiting for my mom to get off the phone so I could call my friends and tell them what J said in biology class. No more stressing about the possibility that my parents might be listening in on extremely private phone conversations about my many crushes. No more slipping quarters into the pay phone to ask my mom to pick me up after the movie was over. My own portable personal phone. I quivered with excitement at the prospect.
 
I did what I could to guilt trip my father into buying me a cell phone. “You’re going to let me ride public transportation—in MIAMI—without a cell phone?” He responded with a shrug. “You’ve been doing it for years without a problem.”
 
I can still remember unwrapping a box one Christmas and leaping for joy when I discovered it was a cell phone. It was one of those rock-heavy Nokia’s with a tiny screen—but it was a cell phone. Of course, it came with a whole set of stipulations, the worst being: no texting. By then, I had started driving and my father wanted to avoid the inevitable—texting and driving. But my sister and I were crushed. We’d found ways around my father’s ‘no instant messaging rule’ on the computer, but this was torturous.
 
All throughout my college years, my father paid for our cell phone service and therefore was able to assert his control over our phone habits. The no texting rule remained until about 2009, when I graduated from college and started paying my own cell phone bill. By the time I started texting (using T-9, the advanced typing technology on flip phones without a full keyboard), many of my friends had started getting iPhones.
 
I remember vividly the first time I saw an iPhone. Sure, it was sleek, but I didn’t see the reason for having a tiny computer on your person at all times. Horrified by the price tag, I chastised my friend for carrying something so expensive around in her purse. It seemed like she was asking for trouble.
 
Since then, iPhones and Androids have become ubiquitous in our culture. The screens have gotten bigger and the technology has gotten more complex, but all the while, I remained skeptical. When my cousin, a manager at Walgreens, told me he loved the fact that he could check his email anytime he wanted, I teased him. “You must be a very important person if your emails can’t wait until you’re at your desk.”
 
Meanwhile, I stayed true to my “dumb” phone, T-9 and all. When the phone company tried to upgrade me to a smartphone, I fought back. When my partner surprised me with an iPhone, I made him return it. He thought he was doing me a favor but I knew the slippery slope that a smartphone would create. It was hard enough to maintain my sanity with the internet in general; having the internet at my fingertips would make that even harder to maintain.
 
As a dumb phone user, I was a proponent of multiple gadgets. Everyone’s reasoning behind smartphones was that it was everything in one, but I didn’t mind have a computer to check email, a camera to take pictures, and a GPS to take me places. I knew the price of having all of these things rolled into one.
 
Being in a transatlantic romance challenged my non-smartphone life. Thankfully, I had an iPod touch, which does most everything that an iPhone does except the phone part. It also doesn’t have a built-in internet connection so it only gets connected when on wifi. This gadget allowed me to FaceTime with my sweetie while we were living on separate continents, although Skype on my desktop would have also done the trick. I began to rely on this handheld device a bit more; one could call it a gateway device.
 
A year into our relationship, I received a Fulbright to teach English in Colombia and my partner moved from Europe to join me in South America. For 15 years, I’d been a fierce flip phone advocate, but in anticipation for our move, I accepted an old iPhone from my partner. It was July 2017. Although I have since parted ways with that particular phone, I have had a smartphone ever since. And about once a week, I vow to throw it down the toilet. More on that next week...

Subscribe
Copyright © 2019 Dispatches from a Digital Life, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you want to be in conversation about our digital life and habits.

Our mailing address is:
Dispatches from a Digital Life
Miami, FL

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.






This email was sent to <<Email Address>>
why did I get this?    unsubscribe from this list    update subscription preferences
Family Roots Project · 6270 SW 25th St · Miami, FL 33155-3053 · USA

Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp