The briefest moments of personal reclusion can infuriate cell phone colleagues worse than their un-celled ones. “Why did you buy the cell phone if you’re not going to turn it on?”

Cell phones. Some of us regard them as essential as the invention of fire. We wield our cell phones like torches that ward off the shadows of disconnection and isolation.

But there are some who still dare lurk in the darkness, away from the satellite beams being shot to Earth and back.

Cell phone users often view these personal technology-immune creatures as backwards cave dwellers rubbing twigs together in hope of the flicker of advancement. Actually, cellular people hope they’ll just wise-up and buy a cell phone because tracking someone down via land lines is a frustration cell phone owners bought their way out of.

Scott Cline, 24, a college student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee studying in the School of Education, discussed why he’s never owned a cell phone.

“Overall it’s too expensive. But more than that, if you have a cell phone, it ties you down. You can be reached even if you don’t want to. You can turn it off, but it’s still there,” he said. “If you have one, people expect to reach you.”

Cellular owners’ friends can put added circumstance to simply pressing the power button on the phone. The common response to such action is “Why did you buy the cell phone if you’re not going to turn it on?” The briefest moments of personal reclusion can infuriate cell phone colleagues worse than their un-celled ones.

So there is a sense of obligation that goes along with a cell phone. Are we obligated to forfeit a section of our privacy with the signing of the contract?

It is one of the 21st century’s truisms that the rise of cellular and Internet culture is causing a slow shaving-away of our privacy. Instant messaging culture, for example, has turned a new generation of youths into “away message-checking addicts.”

There are three Facebook groups at UWM dedicated to this subject: “Compulsive Away Message Checkers Anonymous (UWM),” “Compulsive Away Message Checkers Anonymous: UWM Chapter,” and the colorfully titled, “Putting Songs/poetry Into Your away Message: it's Fucking Pointless.” Combined, 416 students have joined these three groups.

Away messages are like global versions of Post-Its someone puts on his or her office door to let someone know where he or she is. Because someone must care.

Anyone who knows a person’s AIM screen name can see if he or she is online, off-line, busy, at dinner, at work, fighting a Yeti or anything else they write in their away message.

Facebook, MySpace, Livejournal, blogs and search engines are other privacy busters. You can look up that crush in class and see if he or she is single, likes the same movies as you, see where his or her name is published on the Internet, get access to his or her family albums, or view what he or she’s posted about him or herself in his or her given Internet profile. What are you actually going to have left to ask them when you actually “meet” them?

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