Am I being ignored?

I’ll touch on a couple of things in the Ecologizing Mobile Media article by sharing my experience with cell phones.

With my move to Seattle, my wife and I have decided to forgo the traditional home phone and just expand my wife’s cell phone plan and get two phones. The price is roughly the same.

The decision to only have a cell phone is a good example of #4, new technology making war against the old, #5, new technology changes everything and #9 social biases. As was discussed in class with regard to VoIP, I am giving up some advantages doing this. The example though is that I choose one form over the other and my money followed. Just in my experience I think giving up the home phone is not uncommon with many people.

This brings me to the title of this post. Last week my mom tried to call my wife. The first time, my wife was standing in a crowded licensing office for our car and didn’t feel it was a good time to talk, sent her to voicemail. The second time my wife had no coverage and the third time the phone battery was dead, both calls went straight to voicemail. I need to mention my mom hates leaving voicemail and the missed call log doesn’t work if the phone is dead. Now my mom, being a little over sensitive mother–in-law, thought she was being ignored because she knows my wife always has her phone.

When everyone that calls you on a regular base knows you only have a cell phone, the expectation of a return response is different than home phones because they think you are always ‘home’. And if you don’t answer, through the magic of caller-id you will surely call back the instant you can. Mobile technology is creating a weird immediacy expectation in society similar to email.

For the record, I owned a cell phone in the past, but can honestly say I can live without one. Admittedly though, I am slowly becoming an addict of the convenience it brings. Does anyone else ever get the feeling that sometimes technology is rope being handed to us in order to hang ourselves?