When did the mobile phone turn into a lover? The latest advertisement from Orange suggests that your phone is your heart, soul and very reason for being. “Relationships,” its new slogan purrs seductively, “get better with time.” (Cue strange pas de deux between very gorgeous but visibly aged married couple. And no, I don’t know what happened to the wise old man in the last Orange ad, either.)
The message is clear. Your mobile is your lover, spouse and friend. The longer you love it, the more it will love you back. What they’re really talking about, of course, is customer loyalty. You wouldn’t cheat on your spouse, so why cheat on your mobile?
It is noticeable, however, that a lot of us are doing just that. I have started giving my once 24-hour companion the cold shoulder and at times our differences seem irreconcilable. It’s a typically modern relationship. At first it was lust on both sides, but now he wants constant contact and I just want him to shut up. I have started to pretend he doesn’t exist. Half of the time my phone is off.
And I am not the only person who wants to be alone. This is the only possible explanation for the even more bizarre second phase to Orange’s current campaign, which has the slogan: “Sometimes things need to switch off, for people to switch on.” This twee message acknowledges that there is a time and a place for mobile use.
A mobile company telling us not to use our phones? Kristof Fahy, head of brand and advertising at Orange, explains: “We understand and acknowledge that British consumers now care less about their mobile operator than their margarine brand. To address this we need to restate the Orange optimistic view of the future, and we are doing this by celebrating that great things can happen when phones are switched off as much as when they’re switched on.”
With market penetration nearing 100 per cent (50 million mobile phones are now in use in the UK, according to the Health Protection Agency, up from 4.5 million in 1995), companies are increasingly resorting to emotional tactics to keep mobile users addicted. If they are condoning – indeed “celebrating” – switching off, second-guessing us and trying to keep us onside, their consumers must already be doing this in significant numbers. Any other explanation just doesn’t make sense. A change is in the air.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that our love affair with 24/7 mobile use is ending just as revenues are going off the scale. We now spend more on mobile talk than we do on our landlines (£12.3bn last year on mobile use, versus £11.2bn on landlines, according to Ofcom). Between 2000 and 2004, the number of minutes spent making mobile phone calls doubled to 62 billion a year. Landline use fell by 6 per cent. Gartner, a market research company, predicts that by 2010 handsets will cost £14.
The more ubiquitous the mobile, the more tyrannical its hold and the more desperate we are to claw back our lives. Personally, I wouldn’t cancel my con-tract (which, annoyingly enough, is with Orange), but my mobile is on less and less. It started over the summer when I went away on holiday for a week and “forgot” my phone. Instead of feeling anxious and cut-off, I felt free.
Nothing happened that couldn’t have waited seven days, and even if it had happened, I had decided that I didn’t want to know about it.
Thus began an ongoing experiment with switching off completely. I turn my phone on every now and then, just to pick up messages. Is this antisocial and unprofessional? Probably. But these days most people I know seem to be using their mobiles to check messages and call back, no longer constantly available. No one wants to feel like a doctor on call any more.
I switched off precisely because I am sick of being emotionally manipulated by the mobile phone companies. They want us to believe the lie that – as long as we have access to a stream of incoming and outgoing calls – we need never feel alone, unwanted or friendless. But anyone can see that technology is increasingly creating a society in which we are desperately insecure, paranoid and can’t survive without our pathetic props (mobile, iPod, laptop). The endless promise of the ringtone and the pinging e-mail has become exhausting, stressful and threatening, instead of exciting and liberating.
I notice fewer people unashamedly shouting into their handsets on public transport and more people turning them off completely at dinner tables or when visiting friends. It used to be that having a mobile showed you were in control. Now turning it off is a mark of having a life of your own.
Let’s shift the balance. Overthrow the tyranny of the ringtone, ignore the buzz of the Blackberry. True power lies in silence and unavailability. Tell that to the wise old man.
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