Confessions of a Dumbphone Devotee

Thus with a text, I die. If any spark of life be yet remaining amongst Dumbphone owners in this developéd world, it will by mine. What is she that shall buy her Smartphone thrice-accurséd? Not I, but then thou mockest me. Thou shalt buy this Smartphone dear. Long have I endured the scorn of my fellows, their sidelong glances, and their waggish ridicule. To wit, never have I fixed on whether ’tis nobler to endure their contempt or to surrender, lily-livered, to join their bionic-eyed ranks. The rest is silence.

In fair Istanbul, where we lay our scene, vile Smartphone like an appendage most vital, is warmly to be consulted, caressed tender, and gaped at some dozens – nay hundreds – o’times in th’ oppresséd day. ‘Tis an instrument played by idiots, wand’ring blindly down sidewalks full, signifying chaos. Love is blind, and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit with iPhone fair. Blind they are to all but glow of screen. They jig and amble, and they lisp.

Am I wicked to pine for disconnection, for e’en so short a time as this? Extraordinary to desire, sometime, to be lost, to explore, to Know Something Not? Is all this my loathing in solitude – for the perpetual texting, web-surfing, the foul status updating in restaurants, bars, bus stations, taxi stands, dinner dates, vacations, meetings, the metro, the ferry, the ferry station, concerts, family gatherings, parties, walking down the street, driving a car, driving a BUS? Knaves! I say let the doors be shut upon them, that they may play the fool nowhere but in their own houses. They have a plentiful lack of wit. Yet time be not mine, and time will come when Dumbphone be no more. Fortune, thou strumpet! But facing that time, I needs must myself solicit…

To buy a smartphone, or not to buy a smartphone? That is the question —-
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The mockery of all we encounter
Or to fight against a sea of information
And, by opposing, end it? To text, to tweet —
No more — and by a tweet to say we never end
The hash tags and the hundred forty characters
That Twitter allows —- ’tis a deactivation
Devoutly to be wished! To text, to tweet.
To tweet, perchance to trend — ay, there’s the rub
For in that tweet of death what silence may come
When we have shuffled off this world wide web
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of disconnection.
For who can bear the scorn of kin
Th’ Facebook friend’s laughs, the blogger’s scoffs
The pangs of relationship status spent
The Instagram deprived, and the GPS
That marks our course from procreant cradle to grave,
When I myself might Android or iPhone take
With a credit card? Who would no Internet bear,
To grunt, fingers that struggle under T9
But that the dread of something after contract
The undiscovered country from whose network
No texter returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those Dumbphones we have
Than switch to phones we know not of?
But smart phones do make cyborgs of us all,
And thus the Nokia of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of disconnection
And dull protests from humans left among us
With this regard are finally to succumb
And lose the name of “Dumbphone” — Soft you now,
The fair iPhone 6! — Phone, in thy applications
Be all my sins remembered.

Laurel Green is a contributor to Yabangee and loves her dumbphone.