Our Cells, Ourselves

In Iraq, the wrong ringtone can be fatal -- Sunnis are advised not to use mujaheddin anthems around Shiites. The hottest ringtone in Europe recently was the prime minister of Spain saying to the president of Venezuela, "Why don't you shut up."

All over the world, cellphones display status, the way pocket watches or fountain pens served rich men of an earlier age.

Mr. 3,300,000,001

It's possible that Brian Dilley, of Mechanicsburg, Pa., is the guy who sent the world over the edge.

Data collectors quibble over whether the global tipping point toward cellphone ubiquity occurred in November (Informa Telecoms & Media and Rider Research) or any day now (the International Telecommunications Union). But Dilley's girlfriend, Jolene Schneider, gave him his first cellphone for Christmas, so he could be Mr. 3,300,000,001.

In the United States -- where half of all children have cellphones -- it's not easy to find a 38-year-old male who just lost his cellphone virginity. But that's Dilley. After a month, he had received only two calls and initiated three, and hadn't gotten around to recharging the phone yet. The battery indicator still has three bands' worth of power, he says. Only time will tell if he knows the difference between battery strength and signal strength.

"I've gone kicking and screaming" into this new world, Dilley says. "It was forced upon me." His posse made him do it. Dilley is the coach of the Bulldogs, a coed softball team with the proud motto: "It's not about the winning, it's about the beer." When a player was running late, or couldn't make it, there was no way to give Dilley a heads-up. So even in the middle of the game they would call Schneider, who plays on the team, and that got old for her.

But Dilley is still not a convert. "Cellphones are like a dog leash," he says. "If somebody wants you, they just yank on the leash. I see it as more of a nuisance."

Perhaps. But Rich Ling sees Dilley's world as a microcosm of the planet.

"The Internet is quite global. But the mobile phone is the way social cohesion is taking place. It tightens the bonds between us," says Ling, an American who researches the social consequences of mobile telephony for Telenor, the Oslo-based global phone company. He is the author of the forthcoming "New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion."

"Quite a bit of research shows that the tighter the group, the more they use the mobile phone. It takes place in mundane ways -- work, jokes, gossip, coordinating a birthday party for your child, arranging the gang meeting at a restaurant.

"All of the other electronic mediation -- television, the Internet -- there's a real question whether they're fraying the social fabric. But all the research with mobile phones shows tightening bonds within small groups." That's because with cellphones, "I call an individual. In the old system, I call a place and hope somebody might be there.

"This might be one of those steps in the opposite direction from 'Bowling Alone,' " Ling says, referring to Robert D. Putnam's book mourning declines in social cohesion. It has been criticized for not examining what sorts of Information Age links might be aborning.