Blogtrek

How to End Cell-Phone Pollution

The latest form of pollution in our society is Cell-Phone Pollution. You hear them everywhere. You are at an important board meeting at work, with some heavy decisions at stake, and then you hear "bitter bitter bitter…" from some phonelet in someone's coat pocket. At a concert where they are playing Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony, the majestic strains of this symphony are broken up by the clanging of Beethoven's "Für Elise" in a tinny tone from a cell phone in the audience somewhere. You are trying to study in a library when a phone breaks the silence with "Danny Boy". And so forth. They are annoying. People request that cell phones be turned off and forbid them in certain public places, but it seems to do no good.

The problem, it seems to me, is that when a person purchases a cell phone, he usually is interested in calling and receiving calls, and not in all the bells and whistles that it has. I call this "Flashing 12:00 syndrome", from the similar phenomenon with VCRs. In other words, the average user does not read the manual and accepts whatever the phone from the box does when it receives a call, and this most often is the usual "bitter bitter bitter" phone ring, although I suspect some phones put in deedle songs such as "Für Elise" as their default. So when someone gets a call while attending a concert, what happens? "Für Elise", that's what. And people get annoyed.

Now there is a vibrate mode, in which the phone vibrates while next to the person. The person feels it and knows there is a call to answer, and it usually doesn't sound too far, so people are not annoyed. Now if everyone would put their phones in vibrate mode, that would end the cell-phone pollution problem. I always put my phone in vibrate mode. I never have it ring or play songs.

But remember that most people don't even think about it and just simply use the default signal, the one that the cell phone companies put in the phones to begin with. So why not make vibrate the default? If cellular phone companies would do that, then 80 or 90% of the people will have their phones in vibrate mode, and most of the cell-phone pollution problem will be eliminated. Now that's up to the phone companies to do that, but if they did, it would help us recover the peaceful atmosphere that we had before the cell-phone pollution became a problem.

Therefore, I urge cell-phone making companies to factory-set their cellular phones to a default of vibrate mode. And then maybe we can hear the movie.