Smart Phones, Gawking Gophers and the Price of Relevance

Hmmm, how much will it cost me to purchase social relevance?

I’ve made up my mind to step out of the dark ages and buy a smart phone. Yes, I confess that I am one of the shrinking minority who does not yet own one.

I don’t need a smart phone. I don’t even really want one. I have an old school, dumb phone that I hardly ever use. I keep it mainly in the event that I have an urgent need to make a phone call when I’m away from home which rarely happens.

So why am I going to part with my hard earned money to buy something I don’t want? Simply because it seems that almost everything else has one. Normally, I’m not the type to bow to peer pressure. In fact, I’m constitutionally inclined to rebel and go my own way.

And yet, I am going to capitulate in this particular instance. Why? The best explanation I can give is that I feel like I’m at risk of becoming socially irrelevant in a world where that state of being has become a cardinal sin.

I was in meetings recently where the participants were invited to pull out their smart phones and participate in real-time, online polls. Smart phones instantly appeared like gophers poking their heads out of their lairs to gawk at something unexpected.

Instinctively, I slouched a bit in my chair feeling like there was a spotlight on me. “Hey look, that guy doesn’t have a smart phone!” I was tempted to lie and say I left mine at my desk or in the car. But I toughed it out.

This type of situation is becoming a common occurrence. I often find myself in the presence of people who whip their smart phone out to grab a photo of something interesting. I shrug and take a mental picture of the scene for future reference while they’re uploading the photo to Facebook or Twitter or some other social network. Alas, again I’m socially irrelevant.

I know I’ll be faced with a bewildering array of choices when I finally trudge up to the glitzy tech store in the mall. When the eager salesperson asks what I’m looking for, I’ll be tempted to answer: “I want the phone that has the minimum threshold of features required to make me appear to be in step with the times. I probably won’t use most of the features. I only want to pay what I have to in order to pass for contemporary and not one dime more.”

Of course, I won’t say anything like that. I’ll let him or her go through their spiel of features that I might want while I reply: “No… No… No… I guess… Huh?… No… No… I suppose… What the hell is that?… No… No… Oh, they all have that function? Well then, I guess, yes.”

The truth that I’m facing up to is that the smart phone has become the social metaphor for relevancy. I’m still a rebel. But I’m reluctantly playing along in this case because the social price of resistance has become too steep for my comfort.

I know, of course, that the shiny electronic toy I buy will be obsolete before I get out of the mall. And when I arrive home, I’ll find that the user instructions are in a microscopic font size that looks like one large smudge to my 57 year old eyes. But at least I’ll be relevant – or a reasonable facsimile of it.

~ Michael Robert Dyet is the author of “Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel” – double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’s website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com or the novel online companion at www.mdyetmetaphor.com/blog .

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