Status anxiety and the forbidden fruit of cellphones

Having lived in the Middle East and Asia for long enough, I realise that in parts of the world like these, your choice of mobile phone can speak volumes about you to certain observers. Once that object hits the ‘Highlands Coffee’ table, a large percentage of the room has drawn irreversible conclusions about you. I remember an occasion being picked up at Beriut airport in the depths of winter by a very dear friend who arrived like an outtake from a Quentin Tarantino movie.  All puffy new ski jacket, ‘Oakley’ sunglasses, menacing in black garb and clutching the latest (at the time) ‘Nokia Communicator’. A flip-top black matt rectangle of high tech cool. This was prominently held in one’s hand, largely due to it’s size (it wouldn’t fit comfortably into a pocket), partly due to the fact you needed two hands to use it but without doubt because it was the dogs bollocks at the time. This checklist I have described along with the experience of being swept through downtown Beirut in a blacked out  4X4, a firearm with mother of pearl inset handle placed between the seats, constituted to be a thin veneer – deliberately designed and studiedly selected to disguise very modest and humble circumstances back home.

It is all too easy when looking for a new phone to be caught up in the tickle and tease of what can only be described as ‘cell-phone pornography’, as one browses through the reviews of the latest models and aspires to owning a device in your palm that will deliver more than just technology at your fingertips but a whole new promised lifestyle. Style, fashion, kudos, respect through technology but most of all status. Perhaps it is better to compare the hunt for this object with what Alain De Botton best describes in his book: “Status Anxiety” than to the comparison of the use of pornography, despite both activities being (initially at least) parallel in their enactment. The user looks for something unimaginably seductive, the user responds to images and words, the user is dazzled by an array of perceived options. Pornography of course never actually delivers what it promises, yet manages somehow to continue, in a drip feed manner and by it’s mere existence, to convince it’s user that it might be a viable necessity to the user’s life. ‘Status Anxiety’, then works exactly the same way upon our consciousness. We want what our friends have! Moreover we want something better and just beyond the margin of what our friends have; on a separate ’specials menu’ so to speak. We can at once conform and set ourselves apart in a single stroke, a single purchase. This is perhaps why most U.K. nationals spend their entire lives trying to look; trying to dare, to be slightly different from each other -  but end up looking virtually identical. If you have more than one “Coldplay” album on your playlist, you already  know what I am talking about. So then what exactly are the mobile phones that my friends have and why have they got me all excited? More poigniantly why have they got me all excited?

The answer to that question is simple:  ‘Apple Macintosh’. At the end of last year, my workplace underwent a Mac revolution, a computing coup headed by a particularly vainglorious colleague, whose checklist of techy material possessions besides his Mac had been routinely trotted out before us since his very arrival in Vietnam. As if this alone were enough to give him credibility. The idea being, you see - creative people use Macs, don’t they? If we have those Macs- doesn’t it give us that margin of cool? That rarity and aloofness (but not too aloof or exotic) distance from our other more  humdrum colleagues?

Finally, as the last member of my work group to succumb to the ways of Mac, a month ago I bought an i Mac computer. Immediately a ‘Facebook’ chorus of dissent started up when I foolishly announced this: “You’ve  gone to the dark side [Comrade]!”, “Steve Jobs is the new antichrist!”, “Apple’s like a seductive woman you see in a bar – yeah she looks good, she promises a good time, she’s stylish, but go there & you enter a world of pain. Windows is your wife – she might be over-familiar and she might drive you crazy, but you know every inch of her & you’ve known her for years & you love her for what she is & she never lets ya down…” and finally:  You shall see the light [Comrade], come back to all that is good..And before you go any further away from the light I have one more word for you [Comrade]: NOKIA……….” This last remark was thrown in at the end of the bag, after an earlier realtime discussion about whether or not to get an ‘i phone’.

Decisions like buying a car or a house have taken less time than this! This seemingly trivial life choice is becoming more and more like a plot from the “Transformers” saga. I have seen the evidence of Nokia’s N97, E71 and E63, their, metallic, sleek, masculine and no nonsense designs which exude wholesomeness and reliability. Pitted against the equally impressive, multitasking, shiny curvaceousness of the uber sexy Apple i phone 3Gs.  All the while a range of other equally impressive phones clamor for my attention with more features than both of the above and at a fraction of the cost (LG’s ‘Arena’ / ‘Viewty’,  Samsung’s ‘Omnia’ ). Ah? But can they ’sync’ with the i Mac . . . and in the end, do I really want them to enter Apple’s walled garden? Maybe I am a PC Jedi after all and what will that say about my status in life? Will I be any less creative?

“It all depends what you want to use it for!”, I hear you cry! As I pack up my things for a routine visit to Singapore, I ponder this. I am  to meet with an opposite number in the Ministry of Noodles there and  I try to imagine as I am slipping this not- yet-arrived new object smoothly from its pouch and onto a bar table in Clark Quay, whether I will be watching surreptisiously for my sophisticated Comrade’s reaction.