Nowhere safe

I like my cell phone, I really do. I arrogantly put off getting one, claiming that they made our public discourse silly, and I got mad at poeple who answered them in restaurants or other public places, and I resented phone chatters who thought it was more important to talk to distant friends than the person in front of them. I went through all that stuff, which seemed so important three years ago but now seems rather quaint, now that I have a phone and know how to use it, and now that our society seems to have arrived at some basic rules of courtesy necessary to keep polite conversations, in public or in private, going smoothly.

On of the tactics a polite member of society uses to make cell phones work is to take responsibility for shutting the technology off once in awhile. That way, we establish the communicative space around us, and define the parameters of that space for ourselves and for the people who inhabit the spaces around us. We control the communicative space, not the social organization or the technology. But one of the aspects of this power we have, the power to decide on our communicative environment, is that we have that power and that responsibility. The ability and the responsibility is all ours, and this is a new, unnatural thing.

This all came to mind as I was clicking around on the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility site, looking for names of people who might know who wrote the new cattle grazing regulations for the BLM, regulations that suck. What I found, however, was this disappointing story about cell phone towers in National Parks. It seem that "in the interests of safety" the National Park Service is set to eventually have cell phone coverage in all National Parks, all areas of the Parks, so there will not be a place in the U.S., except for some secret military sites, that cannot be accessed by cell phones. This means that we will have the power and responsibility everywhere; there will not be a place free of that very modern decision, one that Lewis and Clark did not have to make. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I feel like some kind of dirge should be sung, some kind of poem read, to mark the last wild space, free of human technological communication. The 21st century has, for better or worse, arrived.