How often has this happened to you: You’re sitting around, minding your own business, when suddenly you feel that familiar, comforting tingle that quietly heralds an incoming call or text message, and after you grab your phone you find that no one has called you. You stare contemptuously at your mobile device as its empty screen jeers back at you.
It would be trite and obvious to say that this is all a bit like “The Twilight Zone,” but, well, this is all a bit like “The Twilight Zone.” If you’re afraid that you’re going mad, don’t worry. You’re far from alone.
The experience is known as phantom ringing/vibrating. More clever types have diagnosed it as “ringxiety” or “fauxcellarm.” One might be able to call it a phenomenon if it weren’t so commonplace. According to a study, over half of all Americans have felt ringxiety. Some have called it a new disorder for our new high-tech age. Others insist that it’s merely a new feature of the human condition 2.0; a negligible, neurological price to pay for our hyper-linked planet. Others still wonder what the difference is between those two things. Suppose that the new order is disorder, that the new condition is defined by conditions. If everyone is crazy, that doesn’t mean no one is crazy — that means everyone is crazy.
There’s a moment in “The Omega Man,” a 1971 @@http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067525/@@adaptation of Richard Matheson’s “I Am Legend,” @@http://www.amazon.com/I-Am-Legend-Richard-Matheson/dp/031286504X@@ when the last man on Earth, played by Charlton Heston@@http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000032/@@, is roaming the empty streets of Los Angeles and begins to hear telephones ringing. The clamorous, metallic bleating continues until Heston finally shouts, “There is no phone ringing, damn it!” At once, the ringing stops, and we return to the yawning silence of before. Years spent totally alone (well, except for the pale-faced mutants on his trail) have exacted an awful toll on Heston: his grip on reality.
Unlike Heston’s Omega Man, we aren’t exactly alone. There are more than seven billion people on this planet, “only” around 24,000 of whom attend the University, and thanks to social-networking technology, the ability of everyone to contact everyone else has never been easier. Facebook has almost one billion users and over five and a half billion men, women and children own a mobile phone — and these numbers are growing. Despite this irresistible, some might say invasive, connectedness, we have collectively never been lonelier, according to Sherry Turkle, the author of “Alone Together.” @@http://www.amazon.com/Alone-Together-Expect-Technology-Other/dp/0465010210/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330491478&sr=1-1@@
Turkle argues that we have grown to rely on digital gadgets and social media to the point where we can’t interact with each other without a screen being involved. @@uh@@People develop stronger relationships with their computers than with their classmates, and because their computers allow them to contact anyone in seconds, people no longer know how to be alone. Technology, Turkle says, has deadened the human spirit, leaving a ghost in its place.
This would suggest that we feel phantom vibrations as a way of feeling alive and connected, whatever those notions mean in our world nowadays; however, the characterization of the sensation as phantom rather misplaces the source of the matter. The ghosts lie not within our cell phones but within ourselves.
