Fear of Phone (FoP) is an increasingly widespread symptom of a text-only age. But what are we losing along the way?
The Swatch phone
As a teenager, before I learned to drive, my favorite extracurricular pastime was hanging out in my seafoam-green-and-pink accented bedroom (it was the '90s), my matching Swatch phone to my ear as I gabbed away to my BFFs about boys and school and the fun we might have if we ever got off the phone. The evenings would go by in a haze of chatting, and maybe also watching Beverly Hills 90210 with the phone pressed to my ear so my friend and I could gasp in unison at shocking Brandon/Brenda/Dylan/Kelly moments. "We're going to find that phone permanently fused to your face one of these days," my mother would say. Fast-forward to now, when you couldn't pay me to hold a phone to my ear while watching one of my favorite shows — though I've been known to tweet about a program all night long. My phone is far more likely to be fused to my hand than my face.
I'm not the only one. As Caeli Wolfson Widger wrote recently in The New York Times Magazine, even a call from a distraught relative nowadays is likely to be sent straight to voicemail to allow us to carry on with our other interactions: tweeting, texting, and emailing. She confesses that even when she has the time and privacy in which to talk, she has chosen not to, almost involuntarily. I know how she feels. I've ignored plenty of calls from friends, boyfriends, beloved family members. To make a phone call without extenuating circumstances has become akin to sitting on a subway floor. Weird. Socially unacceptable. Maybe even perverse. The only thing more perverse might be the refusal to answer a phone call from someone you care about. After many months of trying to convince myself otherwise, I've come to see "Fear of Phone" as a tremendous lose-lose.
Via thedevilsintheretail.tumblr.com