I’ve been experimenting my entire life to see what it’s like to not own a cell phone and see how difficult it is to do.
You’ve probably seen these complaints crop up time and time again: people these days are addicted to their phones. They can’t get enough of them. They are harming people’s social connections, they are harming our eyes, and a whole lot more. A lot of these concerns are overblown, but what I will say is this: do NOT text and drive. That is the one exception I will make when the question comes up of whether cell phones are actually harmful to people.
Now, one of the biggest surprises people have about me is that I am “so into technology”, yet I don’t own a cell phone. How is that even possible? Well, it’s a bit of a story on my part.
The thing to remember, as the domain of this site implies, I live in Canada. What is charged for cell phones has long been outrageous (still is). Canada’s cell phone bills, on average, generally make American cell phone bills seem like a bargain by comparison. Honestly, that was the initial reason for this cell phone boycott.
The second reason is this question: apart from portability, what can a cell phone do that a standard desktop, or even laptop, can’t do? Can you message someone on a desktop? Absolutely! Can you participate in video conferences or chat with video on a desktop? Absolutely. In fact, in terms of raw performance, cellphones are going to not even going to come close to the raw performance of a desktop computer (unless you are heavily modding one to be a computing performance monstrosity or chain countless cell phones together in some way to match a desktop’s performance).
So, with those two reason, I honestly didn’t really feel the need to actually get a cell phone in the first place. Yet, as time progressed, this decision gradually morphed into a hybrid social experiment and technological challenge. How long could I go without owning a smart phone? It turned out, it was probably substantially longer than most people would think.
Indeed, at first, I got to bear witness to more and more people walking around with their nose in their cell phones. At first, it was a rare thing to see, but as time progressed, this gradually became more and more the norm. It reminded me of what it was like in my university days. I was actually one of the first people to show up to class with a laptop to legitimately take notes (I did take education seriously). It felt actually kind of strange that I was the only one with a laptop. I didn’t let it bother me too much and just typed my notes into various notepad files. In fact, one professor actually interrogated me, accusing me of not even paying attention in class. So, a promptly pushed the screen back and held up my notes to my professor to show that I was actually paying close attention. Suffice to say, it was the professor that was the one that got shut down on that one and he let me continue taking notes.
The transformation of the classroom was quite quick. Eventually, a few others showed up with their own laptops in the next year. By the time I was graduating, there was a complete 180 on the norms where it was rare to see anyone with a pencil and paper taking notes in class. We’re talking maybe one or two people that still did it at the time in the class. It was fascinating knowing I was basically ahead of the curve on something like that.
It really wasn’t long after I graduated that this same transformation happened. More and more people walking down the streets were either texting on their way to wherever they were going or just listening to music on their cell phone. I wasn’t blind to the societal transformation by any means. What was noticeable was that it made it harder to strike up a conversation with someone on the bus and talk about what they were studying, though. It felt much more like I was intruding on their personal life and interrupting something, so I spoke to people less as a result.
I know I’m far from alone on this sort of observation. It is probably one of the seeds of skepticism towards the technology in the first place. Where I differ from these skeptics is that it’s not that people are being less social, but rather, the nature of being social is transforming. Plenty of people are texting a friend or communicating with family. If anything, we are much more social, but the nature of that social interaction has changed and is a bit more difficult to casually observe if you are watching people walk by or hanging out at, say, a cafeteria. Not a bad observation for someone who never owned a cell phone, right?
Where the Difficulties Began
Indeed, as I got into work life, it actually wasn’t all that hard to continue not owning a cell phone. Call lists were certainly weird because I was literally the only one on the list with no cell phone and just a landline. It was really obvious to everyone, though it probably helped a few people find numbers quicker. Find the blank space, then go up a few spaces to find the right number. Ironically, I was actually making people’s lives slightly easier by not owning a cell phone. I knew this because I saw more than one person use their finger to find the cell phone column, glide to the blank space near my name, and then glide up a little.
There was, of course, implications to this. Whenever someone wanted to communicate with me, sometimes, they just, out of habit, say, “yeah, just shoot me a text”. At that point, I have to awkwardly explain that I don’t own a cell phone. When I explain that, I know the thought process going through a number of these people’s minds. That generally revolves around, “really? Well that’s odd.” This followed up by the question of, “who doesn’t own a cell phone? Is he telling me this because he wants nothing to do with me?” Me, ever being the person to be helpful to people, then tries to point out that I have an e-mail account. You can, indeed, message people’s e-mail through a cell phone. Yet, 90% of the time, this represents a social friction point where people view it as a hassle to communicate with me.
What’s more, this sort of thing happened at multiple jobs. It was a surprisingly common response. What’s more, people start getting distant to me because it’s just easier to communicate with others as a result. Sure, when it’s convenient, they’ll happily chat it up with me, but it is the convenience of the location and time that allows for that kind of interactivity. I know for them that I would be a fun person to hang out with, but that friction point ends up being a social barrier.
In more recent years, this became more and more apparent. I’ve had interactions with people where someone would ask for a cell phone number for texting, and the moment I say I don’t have a cell phone, some would go so far as to give me the stink eye and quickly break off the conversation right after. Word would spread and I noticed fewer people would be willing to even give me the time of day. For some people, the shallowness can be quite surprising.
What was readily obvious was that cell phones are far more than a simple convenience. It is a social status thing as well. If you don’t own a cell phone, that makes you an outlier akin to an untouchable. You are immediately a lower caste by not owning one in the first place these days. A social connection is difficult to impossible for anyone outside of the more understanding people when you don’t have a phone on you.
What Finally Compelled the Change
While my introverted side of me actually doesn’t take too much issue with not having to talk 24/7 with a group of people, it was becoming difficult to live anything resembling a normal life. While the social stigma was difficult alone, there was a technological change that was happening that would ultimately force me to end this experiment. That is known as two factor authentication (or 2FA).
Increasingly, services are requiring higher security standards. Indeed, 2FA is pretty lenient in some cases. Sometimes, you are required to answer a personal question or input some other piece of information to satisfy that 2FA requirement to log in to different services. The problem is, that sort of added security question generally isn’t considered secure enough for a lot of security standards.
For instance, if the security question is “what is my mothers maiden name?”, that could be quite secure sounding. The problem is, we live in an era of social media where for a lot of people, these details are just randomly sitting around on, say, a Facebook post or account waiting for someone with nefarious purposes to pick that up and use it against the targeted user. It’s actually pretty easy to break some of these added security questions.
As a result of people posting every detail about their persona lives online, it became increasingly clear that a security question really isn’t much of a security guard rail at all. As a result, more and more services have a cell phone text confirmation (via link or numbers) as the only option at all available.
A great example of this is getting some tax information. I generally take my tiny pittance and put them towards investing (yes, I’m not feeling too great about that now that Trump has taken power in the US). Canadian’s have what is known as a Tax Free Savings Account (or TFSA) that they can open up with their branch. The thing is, these accounts have limits to what you can put in that change every year. So, how much room do you have? Sometimes, the answer isn’t exactly clear, but it will become clear if you contact the Canada Revenue Service (CRA).
Canadian’s have two options. They can go online, log in, and get this information, or they can call the number. Logging in is actually extremely convoluted as it asks questions that even the valid taxpayer doesn’t know most of the time. What’s worse is that it also requires 2FA. Even if you have a program on your desktop computer that reads the QR code they send, they’ll block anything that isn’t a cell phone anyway. It’s… asinine in a way, really.
So, I naturally called the number because it’s not impossible for me to get such information. As any Canadian who as ever attempted to contact the CRA by phone, yeah, be prepared to spend hours on the phone. In one instance, I was waiting two and a half hours just to get through and get such a basic piece of information. Inconvenient? Absolutely. Impossible to get without a cell phone? Not so much.
Indeed, there are services out there that I don’t need. For instance, do I really need to download an app from Burger King to tell me when they have a new deal? Not really. I don’t need to jump through hoops just to receive targeted advertising.
The problem is that more and more services are requiring it. Do you want to run YouTube channel that includes custom thumbnails for all your videos? Not without a cell phone you’re not. Are you interested in some online services out there? Increasingly, if you don’t own a cell phone, well, that account creation gets stopped dead in its tracks very quickly. As time goes on, more and more services are simply out of reach if you don’t have a cell phone.
In fact, one of my other investigative journalism pieces I’ve been working on over the last few months ran into severe roadblocks thanks to this.
So, between the social stigma and the increasing reliance on 2FA, it has actually become impossible to continue this experiment. As a result, you can consider this a sort of post experiment wrap-up of this experiment.
It’ll Probably Be Impossible to Do Things Like This Moving Forward
I know there is a contingent of people who love to insist that cell phones are a silly frivolity that people don’t need. They might say, “well, back in my day, we had pay phones and didn’t need those stupid things!” The problem is, choosing to avoid cell phones is increasingly becoming a very difficult task. Whether that’s getting service from a plumber or interacting with the government, living practically is actually increasingly difficult without a cell phone.
So, it’s less of a fun frivolity so much as it is increasingly becoming a practical necessity. Can you do it? Sure, but be prepared to hit a heck of a lot of road blocks – road blocks that are increasingly numerous. This over top of the social stigma of trying to sit that one out.
I guess this concludes one of my long running technological and social experiments. This one lasted over two decades and I can honestly say it was quite the journey on that one. I know I probably have a fair bit to learn as I figure out when it comes to owning a cell phone, but hopefully, all my experience on other pieces of technology will help me along nicely.
