I dislike cell phones for me personally. I dont have any friends that I would call on a cell phone, because most of them I just IM. And when im not busy with something im at home, doing homework, doing something on the computer, and if I MUST talk to someone on the phone (which besides one friend that I talk to maybe once or twice a month would just be to call someone about homework a project, etc), I have the home phone for that. Now, I do have a cell phone, because I was stupid and thought I needed one in case of emergencies, but I rarely use it to the point that I don’t know where it is half the time. Admittedly, they are good for emergencies if your car breaks down, or you are in a pinch or something, but I don’t see the point for my life. I think I have heard them called electronic leashes (Numb3rs?? I think but im not sure) and thats how it would feel to me if i had people calling me every second. Not to mention, the one time I did bring my cell to school at the insistence of my grandparent’s, I stupidly forgot to turn it off and my grandmother called to check the message, thinking it was off and I wound up really annoying my Latin teacher.
I only have one because I don’t drive and need to get ahold of people for rides or to find out what’s going on. Luckilly, I’m on my parent’s family plan that doesn’t cost me much a month.
I cannot stand texting. I see absolutely no use for it. Just go talk and/or call the person damn it! Half the time you can do that before you finish pushing buttons to write your life story into your phone. I’ve said it many times, but not here: If I ever meet the person responsible for texting/instant messages, I’ll probably kill/kick his ass.
I don’t even have a land line at my place, all I have is a cell phone. I like being able to receive calls whenever, and since I can just shut it off or not answer the phone if I don’t feel like talking to someone it’s not a big deal. I still really hate text messaging though.
I forgot to mention that my sister regularly spends $100 plus on text messaging a month…
shudders
I have a cell phone. It’s handy for finding my friends on the university campus, since we have different schedules, or for meeting up for dinner. I also use it if I need to contact someone for homework help, or if I need to talk to someone in my work group (lots of group projects in first-year engineering Q____Q). I mean, you guys act like everyone has a cell phone permenantly glued to their ear/constantly texting someone, but they really don’t. Hell, the only friend of mine who regularly uses texting does it because it’s cheaper than racking up long distance charges from talking to her boyfriend. :\
I love my cell phone and use it like a regular phone. It is the number I give out to people and it makes it easy to stay in touch with friends, family, and work. Plus it works great for an alarm clock and has other nifty tools. I like being able to be reached at anytime anywhere. Plus it is easier having just one number than several.
Man, did Arac shut down Hades or what? He stopped posting in his own thread lol…
Echo echo echo
Would’ve cost me more to get a land line than to just sign up with Sprint for a 200-minute plan, which is exactly what I did. For some reason, cell phones on the bus really annoy me, even though normal conversations don’t. I guess it’s just no fun eavesdropping on only half of one.
The worst are the people who use the phones as walky-talkies. Not only do you get the regular half-conversation, but there’s a loud annoying beep every few seconds as the speakers switch. And, for whatever reason, this function seems to make people walk around holding the phone oddly.
I don’t have one and don’t plan on getting one. We have two in a family of three, and my mother and sister generally carry them, but I’d hate to have one. I have a phone at home and a direct line at work; practically the only times I’m anywhere other than those two places, I’m not going to be answering the phone at all, since I’m either going to be driving or praying.
It’s good to have one around in case I need it though - for example, if I’m grocery shopping and need to call home to ask if what’s at the store is what they wanted; or if I have to go somewhere late at night, I’ll carry one to ease my mother’s Worry Gene. If I ever had to buy one, I’d make sure that only immediate family members had the number. (And not all of those, either.)
I’ve never had one, and I don’t really plan on getting one until a time comes when I’d really need to.
They’re handy, I admit, but I’d have to agree that it gets annoying when people are checking them every few minutes.
There’s nothing in Arac’s post worth responding to because there’s nothing that really contradicts anything I said. And he doesn’t really understand the meaning of redundant. He thinks it has something to do with what technology came first chronologically. It doesn’t.
The speaker is on the back of the phone usually.
Merriam Webster says: “characterized by similarity or repetition.” The repetition of high-speed communication was by the internet of telephone.
Secondly, I adressed several other takes on the word redundant, “exceeding what is necessary or normal,” or “no longer needed for a task,” to address what practical, generally normal uses a cellular phone has that means it does not inherently exceed normalacy (“necessity” would depend on one’s definition and would, given present company, no doubt descend into a mindless debate of semantics were it included), and has functions for which it is still useful and for which other devices do not render it obselete.
Thus, I fail to see any sense of the word in which a cell phone is inherently redundant, as a piece of technology. It may be used to abnormal excess, but every piece of technology may be used to abormal excesses. Before you give a witty reply, need I remind you that you are typing this from the internet, and any comment on aberrations of excess you make about other technology using the internet are immediately shelved as “hilarious irony” and “not to be taken seriously.”
If I need to make a more blatant defense against such other definitions of redundancy, I can. The normal use of a piece of technology designed for communication is to find out wanted/needed information from other human beings. The ideal use of this piece of technology is maximum efficiency in this usage. A cellular phone’s design is, at its basic level, the same as this. Its efficiency is quite high; one may find this information from nearly anywhere, and transmit it in multiple mediums at a high rate for convenience. While cell phones may include other features, such as a camera, this is not a part of the communication device, but rather an additional device in the same shell; just so, a computer has multiple purposes, including communication and gaming, within its same shell. The cellular phone itself, which does not include the camera attached to it, still maintains its original, basic functionality.
Cell phones can, through their extended convenience, lead to a greater level of communication than is desired. However, this is not an absoluteoccurance, merely a possibility, and can be avoided by, to put it bluntly, turning the fucking thing off.
Due to their aformentioned convenience and their mobility, cell phones are also not obselete; they allow one to communicate from a relatively non-static location, which telephones and most computers do not because they do not need a chord and are quite small and light.
Cell phones also are not an excess or obsolete in repeating something one already has, given the feature, noted above, they add to a home phone line or computerized communication.
Your post is 90% flowery bullshit and 10% argument so I didn’t even read it, but:
Cell phones came after phones and do the same thing, in a more intrusive, obnoxious way. They’re as redundant by your definition as they are by mine. The internet is not redundant because it came long before any texting features on cells. Being able to take cells anywhere is not a bonus. It’s obnoxious and useless unless your car mysteriously breaks down deep in some wilderness you’ll never drive through anyway.
Unless you can manage to keep that shit turned off when you’re in the presence of people that deserve your full attention, cells are annoying and nothing else. Otherwise, they’re just a redundant convenience.
Like some posters above, I use my cellular exclusively. I ditched my regular phone about two years ago, and my cell does the job without a glitch so far – it functions as my phone, my camera, my mobile answering machine, my camera, my MP3 player, my stock alert, and sometimes even as my alarm clock.
Well, just for kicks: how do you know the post is 90% anything if you didn’t read it?
:\
Once again you pick something completely retarded to argue about. That, most definitely, is redundant.
Take away cell phones and you take away how Korean teenage girls spend 90% of their free time
Do you really have the heart to do that?
DO YOU?
You know what the other 10% is?
Me.
Good one.
As a pizza delivery boy, I would like to note that having a cell phone makes my job significantly easier, especially when people are dumbasses and forget to provide an apartment number. There have been several occaisions where other drivers who do not have cell phones got lost or delayed while making deliveries and the customer called the store trying to find out what happened to their order. Imagine how much of an ass one feels like when someone is complaining that they’ve been waiting an hour for their pizza and you don’t have anything to say.