Sqwawk!: there is no apparent emotional or material payoff for serious thought

ALONE IN A CROWD
Don't hang up!
By Louis Rene Beres. Louis Rene Beres is a professor in the political science department at Purdue University who cannot be reached by cell phoneJune 12, 2005
Chicago Tribune

I belong. Therefore I am. At a time when "rugged individualism" has become a nostalgic myth in America, being witnessed in conversation with another--any other--is presumed to be absolutely vital. How sad. The known universe is now said to be about 68 billion light-years "across," and yet here, in the present-day United States, being seen on the phone--preferably while walking briskly with rapt inattention to one's immediate surroundings, including life-threatening car traffic or heavy rain--is a desperate cry to every other passerby: "I am here; I have human connections; I count for something; I am not unpopular; I am not alone."There exists, as Freud understood, a universal wish to remain unaware of oneself, and this wish generally leads individuals away from personhood and toward mass society. In one sense, cell-phone addiction is less an illness than an imagined therapy.Ultimately, in a society filled with devotees of a pretended happiness, it is presumptively an electronic link to redemption.In a sense, the attraction of the cell-phone machine is derivative from our own machine-like existence, a push-button metaphysics wherein every decision and every passion follows a standardized and uniformly common pathway.We believe that we are the creators of all machines, and strictly speaking, of course, this is correct. But there is also an unrecognized reciprocity here between creator and creation, an elaborate pantomime between user and used.Increasingly our constructions are making a machine out of man. In an unforgivable inversion of Genesis, it now even appears that we have been created in the image of the machine.Cell-phone addiction is merely the very visible symptom of a pervasive pathology. The underlying disease is a social order built upon nonsense, a literally mindless network of jingles, advertised meanings and ready-made ideas that deplores individuality and celebrates slogans.Our American society has lost all sense of awe in the world.Cell phones in hand, we talk on and on because we would rather not think, and we would rather not think because there is no apparent emotional or material payoff for serious thought.Holding fast to our cell phones, our fondest wish is that we should soon become interchangeable. We should be careful what we wish for.
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