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Karen Heller: High-tech disconnect

In the era of smart technology, stupid behavior abounds. My phone died the other day. Suddenly, smart-phone evangelists began preaching that I should come out of the Dark Ages and upgrade to the intelligence of a BlackBerry, Droid, or iPhone.

In the era of smart technology, stupid behavior abounds. My phone died the other day. Suddenly, smart-phone evangelists began preaching that I should come out of the Dark Ages and upgrade to the intelligence of a BlackBerry, Droid, or iPhone.

But I've seen what these phones do to people, and it's not pretty. I know men who sleep with their phones. I've seen women carry them in their brassieres.

Am I making this up? No, I am not.

Ordinarily polite colleagues quit conversations midsentence, seduced by the succubus of constantly throbbing gadgetry. Why? They have to check the latest e-mails about Canadian pharmaceuticals? Now, you're free to say anything about them because, though they stand nearby, they've spiritually decamped to a location far away.

Some people can't cross a room without their phones. Nor can they go to the lavatory. There are phone users who drop phones in commodes - according to one British survey, 850,000 cell-potty accidents in a single year. Even more astounding is that they weren't embarrassed to admit it.

One in four car accidents involves cell phones, and texting-while-walking accidents are on the rise, sending more than 1,000 pedestrians to emergency rooms in 2008, double the year before.

Texting and e-mail stop for no man, or meal. Many of us have been at dinner only to realize that uninvited guests have joined the table via constant electronic connection. In many a pending divorce, spouses should be able to name the BlackBerry as a corespondent. Every once in a while, it might be wise to put the blasted thing down, and no one will get hurt.

With a smart phone, you are no longer engaged in the immediate environment but sucked into a hailstorm of information. You are not necessarily thinking about your immediate circumstances or surroundings. You are here, but not here, subject to what cognitive scientists label inattentional blindness, a failure to perceive or anticipate events because you're so focused on a secondary task.

And that's what most calls, texts, and e-mails are - secondary, at best. What is the cumulative effect of so much information bombarding us when it's all given equal weight and time, grabbing our attention yet yielding little substance of enduring value? Constant engagement supposedly confers importance and power, but how is technology exclusive if everyone has it?

Initially, pagers were used by physicians and executives. (Well, and drug dealers.) Soon, repairmen had pagers, too. The earliest mobile phones, the size of toasters, were tools of the rich. Today, children as young as 6 carry. They're toys for the sandlot set. So smart phones distinguish adults from the little people with simple phones, sort of, though the behavior often seems puerile. And because all kids do is text, speaking being so passé, parents need to upgrade from dumb phones because their eyesight is weak and their thumbs can't cope.

I was warned not to give my children cell phones. Without such technology, progeny remain less demanding and contact us less. Some parents believe constant contact is a good thing. They are sorely mistaken.

With mobile phones, children - especially tweens and non-driving teens - become armed and dangerous. They will ask for more money, more favors, and so many more places for you to drive them. With mobile phones, they actually become less mobile. Without, they do less asking, more walking.

Did we listen? No, we did not. Our first four-phone bill rivaled a David Foster Wallace tome in length and inscrutable footnotes. One child's cumulative number of texts was not so much a figure as a year of the Great Depression. She was just getting started.

One in three teenagers sends 100 texts or more daily, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 3,000 a month. In my home, make that two out of two.

Now, one child nurses iPhone dreams. Apple is a corporation, I believe, of near-satanic genius. The designs are impossibly elegant and simple: the prices, not so much. We explain that breaking up with our current carrier is much like a wiseguy breaking with the mob: It will cost dearly and there will be blood, in this case as much as $350 per line in the vicious world of early termination fees, explained in one of those egregious footnotes. Wait, we said - though this is not known to be an adolescent skill - Verizon and Apple are supposedly hooking up next year.

I passed on the BlackBerry. Watching my share of addicts occupied, anxious, their attention diverted to a matchbox screen, I realized I lack the dedication to devote so much to one gadget. Besides, most of my e-mail is rubbish. Why would I want more sooner?

Call me antediluvian but, all behavior to the contrary, I'm convinced that life's most important exchanges still occur between two people, in person, without the dross of extra phone fees.