I have a friend whose observations about human nature have always impressed me, but one recent remark in particular struck home. “I see people using their cell phones while they stroll along the beach or in the park,” she said, “and I wonder if they cannot be alone with themselves.”

Like many of you, I go for long walks to clear my head or dissipate nagging worries. Just looking at and moving through my surroundings is almost always a mood-lifter, and I feel reassured to know that I enjoy my own company. But lately I have been bringing my cell phone with me. It seems that the more I have on my mind, the greater my tendency to call someone. As I walk and talk, I’m oblivious to what is around me, my mind’s eye is with the person I’ve called. By the time I finish my walk (which is usually around the end of the conversation), I can’t even remember what street I was on.

In the March/April 1996 issue of CA, I wrote a column titled “The Computer is Not a Tool.” [See www.commarts.com/CA/coltech/wenR_tool.html] I was expressing my concern that communication professionals were referring to the computer as “just a tool.” In my column I said, “This statement implies that we see the computer as an autonomous object that we can direct, one that we can choose to use or not use, embrace or reject. That’s like saying, ‘A car is just a vehicle,’ and seeing a car as simply a means to get from one place to another. We know that a car is much more: it is a force that has shaped our lives, our society, our world.

“To see a computer as a tool is to suggest that it exists to carry out our intentions as we choose. I believe that this is a naïve attitude. We are way beyond the choice of whether or not to allow computers into every aspect of our lives, just as we are beyond choosing whether or not to make cars a part of our lives.”

I was urging an awareness of how profoundly we, as communication professionals, were being affected by computers. In particular, I was concerned about the learning and working spaces that we were constructing for ourselves and our students. Our environments were changing to accommodate the needs and demands of the computers as opposed to ourselves.

At the most surface level, a mobile phone is a replacement tool, affecting the way we maintain contact with one another, just as the car was a replacement for transporting people and goods, and the computer was a replacement tool for analyzing and translating information from one form into another. But again, those are surface aspects. If we look more deeply, we see that the car changed the way we build our environments, and the computer changed the way we live and work within those environments. Now, perhaps, the cell phone is changing the way we live within ourselves.

Many of you who are reading this Photography Annual are professional and fine art photographers, and are considering the implications of the camera phone. As a tool, the camera phone is merely another step along the continuum from the Brownie to the Polaroid to the digital camera. As we have seen in desktop publishing, the technical evolution is obvious: increasing resolution, better lenses, more features. This is a predictable story. What is not predictable is the ways that it will affect us as consumers and professionals. A Verizon Wireless representative recently stated that an estimated twenty million digital cameras will be sold in the United States in 2005. In this same year, also in the United States, he said that an estimated sixty million camera phones will be sold. How will this impact the field of photography and, further, the way we understand the world through images? With its combination of features, the mobile phone implies that we will see (and show ourselves to) the world—whether it’s from a freeway in California or a prison in Iraq—and we will do so in real time.

I sometimes use this column as a place to share your thoughts and experiences. So I am asking you to respond: How is the mobile phone affecting your life as a photographer, as a consumer, as a citizen of the world?

Please e-mail me at ca@wrichmond.com, and I will collect your comments in a future column. (Names will not be published.) Perhaps, after receiving your e-mails, I will take long walks and leave my cell phone at home.

© 2005 W. Richmond