Dial 'O' for Over

Holding power. With a button, a number -- and a person's very existence -- can be DELETED or IGNORED.

Not long ago, when phones were attached to the wall, there was a mystery to their rings. People could not be blocked, nor could they be deleted. Back then, phones were simple. No games. You dialed the number. If somebody was there, they answered. If they were not, the phone rang until you decided to hang up.

There was no call screening, no Caller ID. People were not banished with a DELETE button.

Now society brings with it the constant ringing of phones, the beeping of computers, the robotic voices saying who is behind the ring. Communication has become sanitized and with it, personal relationships have become clinical. You are in or you are out, based upon whether they like you. Question: Why won't they take the call? Answer: Because you have been blocked or deleted.

"Every group and every tribe has some method of shunning and throwing people out," says James Katz, director of the center for mobile communication studies at Rutgers University and author of the book "Magic in the Air," about how people use mobile phones in their lives, which is set to be released in May.

"In our high-tech era, deleting somebody from your cell phone book is the equivalent of throwing them out and shunning them." When you have been DELETED, you are banished into the netherworld of wherever cell phone numbers go, a realm between this world and the next.

Cell phone numbers have become the people they represent. "Indeed, when people lose their cell phones, it's like losing their minds," Katz says. "And they forget who their friends are because they have lost their cell phones."

In Katz's research, he found that cell phones ringing in the middle of the night from secret callers often are the precursors to breakups. "Many young people have told me how a boyfriend or girlfriend will grab the phone when they are not around and go through the 'Recent Call' list. Or in some cases, pry it from hands and demand they explain who that was."

In the past, he said, those clues were more -- shall we say -- physical. "There used to be jokes about lipstick on the collar or some strange blonde's hair on the man's jacket. Those would be low-tech and low-frequency-success techniques to check up on other people, but now in our digital-mobile age, there are very big digital fingerprints all over technology to trace what you have been doing."

Ernesto Alegria, a 30-year-old taekwondo instructor, says cell phones have been disastrous to his "playa" action. "Say you have a girlfriend. You know she is going to go through the phone and check the numbers," he says, leaning on the counter of a cell phone kiosk in Wheaton Mall. "In my case, I don't use my phone, I use somebody else's cell phone to call another girl. Pay phones work better."

With Stacy Fink, 21, it wasn't a number that got her in trouble. You see, she didn't think her boyfriend had it in him to snoop, to go through her cell phone, her personal information.

One night she was sleeping. He saw the text message.