If you want to completely and viscerally comprehend the cell-phone phenomenon, next time you go to any zoo, be sure to visit the monkey house. The first thing will note in the Monkey House (apologies, acknowledgment to the late Mr. Vonnegut, as for so much)--In the Monkey House...the noise is fuukin DEAFENING.
Every monkey in the place is shouting, and stomping, and flying around, striving with all its might and main to be heard and or noticed by others of their kind. Desperately. Insistently. Unendingly. The cries echo: "WhataboutMe-ME-ME-ME-Me-memememe-ME?"
For humans, but for pretty much ALL the primates, the essential, life-preserving task is to assure yourself of both your membership in and proximity to, but also your STATUS within, the troop/tribe or group. It's primal.
And that is where the tweet/twitter/talk/text capacity of these latest hand-held communications devices attaches to humans' most tender, sensitive, and least articulated emotions: down, deep, at the spinal chord level, the old lizard brain. That unspoken terror: "Don't Leave ME! I'm WITH you guys....Please!" Cuz as individuals, we're pretty puny beasts, and we know it...or we'd better. Alone we stand NO chance.
The stories of all our intense human relations, it seems to me, bear the hallmarks of the centrality of those two determinative principles: membership and status. The very survival of the individual depends on their success in ensuring their association with the group. It's Manichean it the very basest level: in or out? Living or dead; Diner or dinner...
Then, the next--but no less consequential--thing is status. Where do you STAND in the social order--because social order is pretty much sine qua non for collective living. If confirming your membership is a "first nature" task and accomplishment, then accurately assessing your status in the group is the "second nature" equivalent.
Status, of course is not an absolute, like being or not. It's always subject to change, and such changes are significant in your life in the troop/tribe/group. So it behooves us to reassure ourselves.
And that's what our "communicators" do for us.
Once, when we got out of view and or ear-shot, were were lost and alone. But no longer. So we keep talking, very loudly, all the time, with people we know, like big bees, doing an audible, pheromonal buck-and-wing on the doorstep of the hive.
Where a false step can be fatal. I'll do MY dance fer ya when I see you at the beach, hippies...Bzzzzzak to you in Hibbbzzzzzzz Central, Winstone...bzzzzzzzzzz
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