Confessional Cell
One of the great, contemporary discordancies in life is the fact that you can ask someone with an arm in a sling, a pit bull attached to a leg, and a police officer approaching with gun drawn, “How are you?” and they will nonchalantly respond, “Good, how about you?” However, you’ll hear a total stranger sitting near you on a cell phone telling someone who is clearly neither their lawyer nor their confessor the most intimate details of their sex life, work status, feuds with family, fraudulent acts, and addictions.
It’s as if the tiny screen held to one’s ear has replaced for all the larger screen that Catholics kneel against to confess their sins. The cell phone has become the catholic (in its meaning of “universal”) confessor. (Catholics were once required to confess weekly, but it’s now merely annually. The cell confession seems to be daily, at least.)
The intimacy of sharing personal details in public places borders on the oxymoronic. Yet it seems as if holding the small device to one’s ear in communication with a distant, disembodied voice, makes for an environment of total catharsis. This occurs to the extent that the speaker becomes oblivious to the actual, embodied beings in proximity to the conversation who range from uninterested to horrified. I’ve been treated to a lawyer suggesting an unethical trick in the courtroom, a man selling drugs on a train, a young woman describing her date in lurid detail, and a woman cheating the IRS, to name just a memorable few.
I don’t recall hearing such things around pubic phone booths, or at office water coolers, or even in bars (though I was never the bartender). But with increasing candor and lack of constraint, people are in fact confessing to all kinds of things to parties on the other end who in all probability do not provide the cloak of client-attorney privilege, or even of sources being protected by journalists under the First Amendment.
Perhaps such unbridled, unabridged, ululation is good for the soul. One thing is for sure: It’s got to be good for the likes of Apple and AT&T.
© Alan Weiss 2011. All rights reserved.
Shirley A Burns
Recently at lunch my guest pointed out to me a table nearby, where there were 3 sitting at the table… all of whom were on their cell phones carrying on conversations! We thought maybe it was ‘coincidence’ that they all had a call at the same time, but as time went by and the phone conversations did not end, we wondered why the 3 had decided to join each other for lunch instead of whomever was on the other end(s) of the cell phone conversation(s)!
(Hmmm – since Confession is required at least once per year… but also any time one is not in a state of grace and wishes to receive Holy Communion, maybe priests should offer the option for the penitent to sit across from him and call him on the cell phone…)
Scott Simmonds
I rarely go into a public place by-myself without my iphone and ear buds. I seem to have a sign over my head that says, “Please talk of your intimacies loudly.”
Music, recorded books, podcasts, anything but the cackling of the self-absorbed.
Alan Weiss
“Forgive me operator, it has been an hour since my last call, and I have misdialed….”
Alan Weiss
Funny story!
Chris Grieve
Perhaps the public confessional is part of the human condition – a need to be noticed? Picture the 1980s, pre-mobile phones, pre-electronic security passes, I was sitting on a bus to work wishing I could block the sound of the woman behind loudly confessing to her friend that she’d lost her security pass weeks ago and had been flashing her video rental membership card to get into the building. Braying with laughter, she made sure the whole bus knew she’d got away with it. They alighted from the bus at my stop, as did several others, including a man I vaguely recognised but couldn’t place. The next day, as I entered my building, the woman was being led away by the man who was now dressed in his security guard’s uniform. You never know who’s listening. [That she got away with it is another story…]