soup now: snakes! bears! isopods! - a brief history of the mobile phone

Old and outdated phones are referred to as “bricks”. This comes from the days when they were actually carved from stone. Sometime in the distant past that scholars refer to as the early nineties it became fashionable to carry bricks around in your pocket or handbag. There were also boybands. Then someone decided that they could use the bricks as telecommunications devices.

In the beginning they could make phonecalls and send text messages, but most importantly there was a game where a line that looked a bit like a snake* ate little squares and increased in size until it became too large and destroyed itself. This was a metaphor for the banking culture of the time, an unheeded warning that nothing can be “too big to fail”**

Then phones got smaller, and then smaller, and they carried on shrinking until we couldn’t find them anymore and had to get new ones.

Now mobile phones are bigger again and can do things like make video calls and google what to cook if you only have a red pepper and a cranberry muffin in the fridge. I don’t have a phone like that, because I’m not allowed to have nice things. When I have nice things I leave them in cabs, and in the pockets of jeans to endure a wash and spin cycle. Sometimes I drop them down steps into puddles.

The further along the evolutionary chain the phone is, the less robust it becomes against the sort of conditions I manage to inflict upon it daily. I am thus forced to choose a phone dating back to prehistoric times. But not a dinosaur – dinosaurs are creatures that are unable to withstand a meteor colliding with the earth and the resulting clouds of dust blocking out the sun and wiping out plant-life. This is the kind of situation I could easily end up creating for an electronic device.

My phone is also not cool enough to be a dinosaur*** it’s more like an isopod. The kind of creature that just says “Fuck you, evolution! I’m awesome as I am” and then crawls back to its underwater lair. That’s pretty much my phone – it has shown no interest in developing touch-screen capabilities, and the predictive text corrects every use of “the” to “Tehran”. It has also retained a feature I had thought had been lost to the mists of time – text message templates.

The text message template dates back to the distant past, predating even the crazy frog ringtone. Before phones had developed querty keyboards, texting could take a while, so someone thought it would be helpful to have a few already written out. I’m not sure if anyone actually used these, but they were there.

My phone does have a querty keyboard, but has clung to its message templates as an isopod clings to its terrifying appearance. Like some sort of evolutionary hangover, the message templates loom, disconcertingly. Text message templates are a mobile phone’s appendix – we think they’re just leftovers from a bygone age, but they are also a window into the way things once were. Also, if something goes wrong with them the phone might explode or something, we just don’t know.

But perhaps more interesting, and certainly more entertaining, the templates our phone companies give us show us what they believe our worlds to be like. And what a world LG thinks I live in. With such gems as:

Cool
Hell yeah!
Hell no!
Leave me alone.
That’s hot!
That’s lame.
Sweeeet
Zzzzzzz…
You rock!
You suck!
This sucks!

LG sees my life as some sort of outrageous dichotomy where things are lame or hot, where people rock or suck, and need to be told which. Short, and to the point, the LG user has no time for subtlety. We’re apparently impulsive, and dualistic thinkers. This hypothetical individual sounds a lot more decisive than me, and they seem to have a more exciting life, if I’m honest.

The Nokia user’s evolutionary baggage is less emotional, and more down to business. Their templates include:

I'm busy right now. I'll call you later.
I am late. I will be there at
I'm in a meeting, call me later at
I will be arriving at
Meeting is cancelled.
See you at
See you in

All providing ample room for customisation. My suggestions are:

I will be arriving at the dropzone at the appointed hour. Bring the cash and no-one dies.
See you invaded Canada last night – few too many?
Meeting is cancelled. Bears!

But now we come to the moment I announce my favourite text message template of all time. It’s a prestigious award with a cash prize to boot***** and it goes to:

I love you too

Are Nokia users so over-burdened with text declarations of love that they just don’t have the time to type those four short words? What must life be like for such gods of romance? And what must it like to date one? Could you ever be secure enough to accept their heartfelt messages, or would the question of whether they cared enough to type it out, or just selected a template, drive a mighty wedge through the tender centre of the relationship, destroying any hope of the beautiful future you both dreamed of?

Terrifying, but less so than any attempt at personalisation:

I love you too much to lie to you – I slept with your brother.

But at least the Nokia user has a passable response to a confession of love. The LG user is left with a number of worrying options to let someone down - ranging from the devastating “Leave me alone” and “That sucks!” to the nonplussed “Zzzzzzz…” Even when the feelings are reciprocated, you’re sure to disappoint when you have only “You rock!” “Cool” or “Sweeeet” to chose between. My advice is to go with “That’s hot” and hope for the best.

Perhaps switching to a Nokia phone would bring significant improvements to my life. Maybe I would become the sort of functioning adult human who attends meetings and expresses feelings of affection confidently, rather than suddenly taking on the appearance of a woodlouse exposed to sunlight, and desperately searching for a rock to crawl under.

Or possibly, I should just accept my fate as a social isopod. Some creatures are destined to live in groups and have their soft fur groomed by their fellows, and some of us are just more suited to a solitary life in some nice damp mud, away from the screams our horrifying appearance elicits.