The Construct

If my phone represents who I am then I’d be obsolete

Alex @ September 22, 2008 | | Politics and Society, Technology |

I hate the Filipino mobile phone culture. I hate how it became a status symbol. I hate how people let their phones govern their lives. I hate how companies developed this mobile lifestyle equating phone use to necessity. To some extent it has become one but isn’t it ironic how people have money to burn for credits and yet complain how their wages just won’t suffice.

For me phones are simply pang-text and pantawag. I own a year-old Nokia 6020. It has SMS and MMS capabilities and a crappy 1.3 MP camera. And even my scope of use doesn’t maximize its capabilities. The phone still works fine but it’s casing had seen better days.

I happened to be washing my car yesterday and spied our neighbor’s help fiddling with her phone. It was one of those fancier ones. I didn’t feel sorry for myself, I felt sorry for my phone. On the pecking order of cellphone elitism, even our neighbors’ help’s cellphone would put my trusty phone to shame.

Last Thursday, as part of my day-out with Risha, we had to drop by a Smart Business Center to have her phone checked out since her Sony-Ericsson phone just died for no apparent reason. I wouldn’t write extensively about how Smart and Sony-Ericsson had us going back and forth only to find out both centers had no idea what to do with out case, in fact that’s about it. (And to the Smart customer service person at the Trinoma branch, there’s a way to handle customer inquiries without carrying sanctimonious bitchy tone.) But what stood out in the whole experience was what we got to observe while queuing at the Sony-Ericsson service center at SM North.

For one, we were amazed at the sheer number of people having their phones fixed that day. The store was quite small and serves both new purchases and repair services. It was a Thursday afternoon and I expect that it should’ve been a slow day for them and yet we were 10th in the queue. Shouldn’t seeing a long queue at the service center (and made up of irate customers at that) warn you against a particular brand? And yet the store was making sale after sale.

Some of those making inquiries were even already sporting not-too shabby phone models. What’s the average length of ownership of phones these days anyway. Says something about how some people make their buying decisions. Gadgets are never an investment unless, of course, you can use it for profit-making endeavors. Makes you think how a construction worker maximize the use of his PDA phone. Not that I’m saying that the person has no right owning a swanky phone. It’s just that I think he was better off investing his money elsewhere.

Now, just this morning I saw this Nokia ad on Facebook (pictured above). “Not just a phone, it’s who we are.” I could go on critiquing the grammatical inconsistencies of the ad but zooming out to the macro level, it’s still part of cultivating a culture driven to deeply ingrain mobile phone consumerism into our lives. Going by the ad’s logic, therefore, I am low-end and obsolete, totally incapable of duking it out with the rest of hip and mobile crowd. And if my life is contained in that piece of junk, then it is nothing but a split between a caring girlfriend and work (wait, that doesn’t seem so bad…).

Still, the point is our society’s trapped in this vicious cycle of consumerism where we are forced to trade basic human necessities for wants-turned-needs.

Tags: Gadgets, Mobile Phone, Politics and Society, Technology