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  3. Can We Live Without Our Mobiles? Are you a mobile phone addict? HELLO. My name is Damian and I’m a mobile-phone addict.

Can We Live Without Our Mobiles? Are you a mobile phone addict? HELLO. My name is Damian and I’m a mobile-phone addict.

admin2010-03-26  83
问题                                        Can We Live Without Our Mobiles?
    Are you a mobile phone addict?
    HELLO. My name is Damian and I’m a mobile-phone addict. I am here today to face the truth about my condition and hope that by speaking out 1 can help others to overcome their own problems.
    The casual observer probably couldn’t detect anything wrong with me. I have a respectable appearance and my behavior in public isn’t shocking or conspicuous. I hadn’t even realized myself that I was a mobile phonoholic, until the past few days. But I have just spent two of those days conducting an experiment that has revealed the awful reality. I have suffered mentally and physically. And my experience has convinced me that I am only one of millions of fellow addicts. You may well be one yourself.
    I have just attempted to live my life without a mobile phone. I was one of four people asked to eschew(回避)my phone for two days. Russell Crowe was not officially part of our group, but maybe he was trying a similar thing in a New York hotel lately. If he had used his mobile, rather than the hotel phone, to call his wife in Sydney he might have been able to secure a connection and wouldn’t have been so enraged that he threw a phone at a clerk and ended up handcuffed(拷上手铐)in a Manhattan court.
    The magic power of mobile phones
    Mobile phones have been the biggest agent of change in the daily behavior of Britons in the past decade. Today there are more than 55 million mobile phone subscribers in Britain, a huge leap from less than 10 million users in 1997. As the size of the handsets has diminished, their influence has grown, altering the speed and frequency of our communication with each other, quickening the pace of decision- making and altering radically the way we plan our working and social lives.
    As the coverage of mobile phones has extended, so the world has shrunk; now it has been announced that we will soon even be able to use them on the London Underground. There will be nowhere beyond their reach (and, even as an addict, I dread this. The only thing worse than a mobile phone train bore(在火车上用手机聊天的无聊之人) will surely be someone exposing their sweaty armpits(腋窝)to lift their phone to their ear and yabber(急促而含混不清地说话). "’ello darlin’. I’m underground .... I said I’MUNDERGROUND! Amazin’ innit?")
    Two days without a mobile phone
    Switching it off at the beginning of Day I was strange. For the past few years I have done this only when boarding an aircraft. Even on holiday — and this may strike you as rather sad — I put the phone on silent and annoy my wife by checking it at least every few hours.
    Dorothy Rowe, a clinical psychologist, tells me that this sort of behavior is consistent with extroverts "who need reassurance that other people are thinking of them. Your degree of self-confidence will determine how much you worry about it." Worry about it? Me? Don’t be ridiculous, l check only out of idle curiosity. I’m not a needy control freak or anything.
    I should have left the phone at home, or at least put it in a drawer for two days. But i couldn’t bring myself to do that, so I left it sitting on my desk. For the first few hours of abstinence (节制)I kept involuntarily picking it up and looking at the display to see if I had any messages or had missed a call, only to see that it was, of course, switched off.
    When I had got used to the fact that it was off, I still picked it up, turned it over in my hand and fiddled with it, like a smoker fidgeting with a packet of cigarettes. I realized that I had a whole routine of nervous tics (不自觉的习惯行为) involving my phone and that these were exacerbated (加剧) by my desire to use it. I took these to be the physical effects of undergoing the process of withdrawal.
    My 40-minute walk home at the end of the day is normally a time for making calls, mostly to friends or family. Now that I was banned from doing this, the phone felt as if it was torching a hole in my pocket. I was desperate to use it. My fingers twitched(抽搐)
    These two days were mostly office-bound and I didn’t need to use my phone to do my job. I can’t imagine how I would have been able to operate if I had been out on a story. Like anyone working on the hoof away from the office the phone is glued to my car and I can make and receive dozens of calls a day.
    Can we live without this machine?
    How did we ever work without mobile phones? I dimly recall the beginning of my career, more than a dozen years ago, constantly searching for phone boxes, laboriously leaving messages and placing hourly check calls to my editors.
    Many mobile calls we make in our private lives are certainly unnecessary. But the convenience of a phone is undeniable. 1 wasted 15 minutes trying to locate an address in my car because I couldn’t call and ask for directions. I also bought the wrong skin cream for my son because I couldn’t make a call home from Boots.
    Rowe suggests that being hooked on our mobile phones may not have made os better at communicating, particularly in our personal lives. "Our communication is not necessarily better. A good rule used to be that if you were angry with somebody you wrote them a letter but, rather than post it straight away, you slept on it. The trouble with instant mobile phone communication is that you can act on impulses that you will later regret. ’
    When I switched the phone back on after two days I found I had three messages and four texts. OK, so l was a bit put out that there were not more. I had missed the chance to do a phone interview that I had been trying to secure for two weeks and an invitation to a last-minute lunch. Frustrating, but to be honest, no more than that.
    However, I was relieved to have the phone back on. My fingers soon stopped twitching. I sent some trivial texts and made a couple of meaningless calls and that cheered me up.
    I remain convinced that the phone is a crucial tool for work, but realize that otherwise it is often just a pointless security blanket: "Hi, darlin’. I’m on my way home. Just leaving the office now. Love you. Byeeeee."
    So do I have the strength of character to stop using it as such? Of course I do. I just choose not to. As I said, I’m not a needy person.
After turning his mobile phone on again, the author felt ______.
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