The six hundred residents of the Slocan Valley in British Columbia, Canada wish to remain cell phone free. A group of residents told telecommunications company Telus Corp. that they would like to keep their peace and quiet.
Said Bill Roberts in a statement made on Friday,
The fact that we’re without cellphone service means that we’re able to enjoy life without the incessant sound of ringtones, immediately followed by someone’s shouted conversation.
Residents of the Slocan valley hope that the fact that they are without cell phone service will attract people.
Source: Reuters
I would like you, dear readers, to respond to a few short questions if you have time.
1. How important is your cell phone to you?
2. What is your average monthly phone bill?
3. Could you live somewhere that did not offer cell phone service?
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Tags: Technology
29 responses
Jul 24, 2007 at 6:52 am
1. How important is your cell phone to you?
My cell phone gives me freedom. It allows me to go on the business of life while carrying on my business. I am not tied to a land line waiting for it to ring. If short – my cell phone is very important to me.
2. What is your average monthly phone bill?
Cell phone bill or Phone bill? Well, they both are about $80.00 (U.S.) per month.
3. Could you live somewhere that did not offer cell phone service?
No way!
Jul 24, 2007 at 7:39 am
1. How important is your cell phone to you? Being a teenager my phone is a big part of my life, allowing me to keep in touch with friends and arrange transport with parents if needed.
2. What is your average monthly phone bill? Thirty dollars a month (prepaid)
3. Could you live somewhere that did not offer cell phone service? I could indeed live somewhere that had no service, but i find mobile phones to be useful additions to my life rather than an annoying one.
Jul 24, 2007 at 7:44 am
1. It’s very important. But more for its functions than for making/receiving calls.
2. Around $15 (I’m in Brazil)
3. Depends on the local lifestyle and job that I’d have. But I can say it’s possible to live without it… But I wouldn’t want to do so…
Jul 24, 2007 at 8:46 am
What are they doing?, Boycotting the high cellphone service prices?
Jul 24, 2007 at 9:47 am
How important is your cell phone to you?
sadly its become very important. I’m a college student and need to keep in touch with my family. But because I move so much and i am rarely home to take calls I must use a cell phone. I’d like to throw it away but I can’t so I minimize the annoyance by having rules like no ‘funny’ or ‘music’ ringtones, just a ringing noise like a normal phone. I keep it on silent in class, at the movies, or at dinner, and for about two hours a day I shut the thing off entirely.
Bill: 50$ a month! i know… i’m being screwed.
if I lived somewhere that did not offer service and I LIVED there and wasn’t planning on just moving again in 12 months then yes, absolutely. it sounds great. on top of that that part of a Canada is beautiful…and its canada… Canada rocks. (I am an American)
Jul 24, 2007 at 11:46 am
What?, is that about the ringing noise that annoy people?
What about moving the frequency band of the ringtone a few tones lower, same thing for the PMPs, when you do that, you can listen to stuff at the same time as you hear everything that’s going on around you & stuff.
Jul 24, 2007 at 12:21 pm
There was life before cell phones/no cell…life goes on..it is a luxury.
Average bill….around $30.00
As long as I have a land line in my home…that is a neccesity, I could pass on the cell phone.So yes I would live somewhere without cell service.
Jul 24, 2007 at 1:10 pm
My cellphone keeps me in touch with others, but may be really annoying when I do not want to see anyone ! Thus, sometimes, I can switch it off with some joy !
I pay 35€ (France) per month
I could live in some place cellphone free, but just for holidays !
Jul 24, 2007 at 5:09 pm
1. Not particularly. I just use it for emergency calls when someone is babysitting my daughter.
2. $20 every two months. I have pay as you go and that’s my minimum charge.
3. Absolutely. The only reason I really need cell phone service is that so many places have removed public phones. The movie Bullit has a great scene where Steve McQueen walks into a restaurant and phones his office to let them know that he’s reachable at that number, and then sits down to eat. Such a civilized way to live if you truly have to be on call.
Of course that said, a cellphone is becoming part of my life. They’re habit forming. Like having access to the Internet. It’s so much easier to be able to bug people whenever a thought strikes you, than to save up all your thoughts, wait to call, and have an actual conversation.
Jul 24, 2007 at 5:32 pm
just another reason to turn to peekamo i guess. hehehe.
Jul 24, 2007 at 6:38 pm
Tim, what you say is correct.
Jul 24, 2007 at 7:01 pm
1. A cell phone is not very important to me, and is only used to communicate with my spouse. I’m a freelancer, and I suppose I should be reachable 24/7, but my clients cope just fine. I’m never lost clients for failing to surrender my life to them.
2. My cell bill is $20 every 90 days, pay-as-you-go
3. Lack of cell service in a community is fine, perhaps even attractive. Maybe I’m biased with a cell tower being built two blocks from my home.
Broadband Internet is a necessity though.
Jul 24, 2007 at 7:06 pm
For a number of years a local cellular company ran TV ads featuring a man lying on a beautiful beach enjoying himself. He then received a business call.
Maybe the marketing message was “you can do your business on the beach,” or “you’re always reachable when something important happens.” I merely saw a man’s vacation being rudely interrupted. I prefer my pre-cellular life, but for various reasons I have to carry a phone, or at least keep it in my car.
Jul 25, 2007 at 12:51 am
I love gadgets, gizmos and technology, but I am starting to hate my cell phone. I have a FTTH Internet connection that is supposed to be good for 100mbps, but gets me about 25mbps. For most of my communications I use Skype.
With more and more wireless hotspots opening up around me, I cannot help but wonder if a time is coming that I will be able to throw out the cell phone once and for all. The time is not yet right, but I definitely think it is coming.
My cellphone is for emergencies, or finding my wife when I wander off in department stores. Which I do surprisingly often. I am increasingly thinking of giving up my phone.
My phone is slightly important to me, I pay about $70 a month for two phones on a family plan. I could live without it, as I long as I can have an Internet connection.
Jul 25, 2007 at 1:19 am
1- I wish I had a phone when I was in my cell.
2- 0$.
3- No, I think I’d die instantly.
Jul 25, 2007 at 1:20 am
He who carry less, can more
Jul 25, 2007 at 1:25 am
I always carry my communicator with me so my friends can beam me out if necessary. Fortunately, it’s practical nanostructure allows it to take many shapes of earth human post-industrial technology. Sometime they are simple earings, sometimes tattoos, sometimes contact lenses, sometimes piercing, sometimes Calvin Klein T-Shirts, etc, etc. I like that, C’ell phun!
Jul 25, 2007 at 11:57 am
Mike, peekamo doesnt charge right?
Jul 26, 2007 at 8:24 am
1. How important is your cell phone to you?
I don’t have one. I have phone, voicemail and caller ID both at home and at the office. That’s as connected as I really need to be. Besides, I have seen cell phones turn too many otherwise normal people into complete blithering idiots.
2. What is your average monthly phone bill?
About $35.00
3. Could you live somewhere that did not offer cell phone service?
Absolutely. And a world without a cacaphony of ringtones would be bliss indeed.
Call me a Luddite if you like, but I find it tremendously dismaying when one can stand on a crowded streetcorner, and everyone will be talking at once, but NO ONE WILL BE TALKING TO EACH OTHER. Cell phones were supposed to keep us better connected; instead they are isolating us from each other. I don’t think there’s a single device in recent memory that has caused such a severe erosion in common human courtesy. And of course it’s only going to get worse.
Jul 26, 2007 at 11:43 am
Chuck,
a- a streetcorner is not a cocktail party.
b – people will likely talk to each others, it’s just that you may not always see who they’re talking too.
c – because people don’t talk to you doesn’t mean they don’t talk to each others. (no offense — business and friendship don’t mix (or does it?) )
d- people don’t talk on cell phone all day long, most of the time the cellphone is off and the person is free to be approached in person.
e – the situation you describe is no more different than a foreigner or an explorer arriving in a foreign country or place where he/she doesn’t understand any of the language spoken by the locals and where he/she must make some effort in order to understand and communicate with the locals and survive. (i.e.: like the learning process.)
f- the people who are most easily reachable by their peer are the one that will be able to seize opportunity faster and gain strategic advantage over those who get informed last.
Jul 26, 2007 at 4:34 pm
DEAR KENNY:
My, did I touch a nerve?
Hey, if your cell phone makes you happy and helps you keep your “strategic advantage,” more power to you. I guess I’m just not quite that competitive. Nor am I a gossip. Nor is it important for me to be laughing and smiling and yacking away on my cell phone while my SUV goes careening through rush hour traffic.
Jul 26, 2007 at 7:07 pm
I grew up without a cell phone. I got my first phone when I was about eighteen. At that time, it was a crucial tool for social networking. When you are getting into the dating game, you do not want the people that you meet calling your house and getting your parents. A cell phone allows young people a level of independence and privacy.
For my close friends and family, I use my land line. I never give my land line number out, except to people that I am very close to.
A cell phone allows me a buffer between my daily life and my private life. When I do not want to be disturbed, I turn it off. These days it spends more and more time off and I am increasingly wondering if I really need it.
Chuck: I understand where you are coming from.
Kenny: Settle down buddy, Chuck is entitled to his point of view and I do not think you are going to be able to change it.
Jul 26, 2007 at 7:46 pm
Chuck,
“My, did I touch a nerve?”
No, sorry if it seemed that way.
Jul 28, 2007 at 9:10 am
I don’t want to belabor the issue … but this exchange remainds me of something I read on Andrew Sullivan’s website … posted by one of his guests:
“Eating dinner at a bar the other night, I sat next to a sales rep for a company that produces portable home dialysis units. He was drinking pretty hard, celebrating a deal that he’d just closed and telling me how soaring diabetes rates were going to create ever greater demand for his revolutionary product. I thought he was going to propose a toast to kidney failure.
“But what bothered me most about our conversation was the streamlined plastic phone device implanted in his right ear and connected via Bluetooth to the Palm Treo lying on the bar in front of him. Every minute or two the earjack would light up, suddenly pulsing white and blue, and I’d forget whatever I was saying to him or whatever he was saying to me. Finally, I asked him what the light was. “That just means the thing’s turned on,” he said. As he said this, he was looking at his Treo screen, which he did about every thirty or forty seconds. His face changed — had some important message arrived? Still speaking to me, but without much focus now, he tapped out a line or two of text with his amazingly prehensile thumbs. He’d left the scene, I sensed; he was somewhere else. At headquarters, perhaps. And I’d been placed on hold.
“I didn’t like it. I never like it. And it happens constantly. I’ll be in the middle of what I take to be a sincere human interaction with somebody and they’ll start cutting in and out — checking the Blackberry, texting on the cell phone, stylus-ing the electronic calendar. No apologies, either. No ‘excuse mes.’ As though a mixture of physical proximity and electronic separation is the accepted new mode of social togetherness. I swear I’ve seen couples out on dates who speak to each other only when the menu comes, to negotiate their appetizers, and then drift off into conversations with others until the check arrives.
“And yet they call it “communications technology.”
“When the dialysis salesman returned to earth, I committed a faux pas by asking him what he’d just been writing about. I thought I was entitled to ask this question because he’d been conducting his business in front of me. I found out otherwise. He glared at me. What kind of spying busybody was I? The warmth between us never returned and we ate our salads in different universes, staring at the TV behind the bar. The light in his earjack pulsed. I paid my tab. When I left, I mumbled a goodbye, but the salesman didn’t acknowledge it. He was tapping on his keys.”
Perhaps it’s just as well that we are, each of us, only so long for this world.
Jul 29, 2007 at 7:53 am
1. Not at all. Wouldn’t have one unless someone pays for it (like, an employer). I prefer the freedom of not being chained.
2. For local and long distance, $35.
3. Yes, in fact I’m contacting the Slocan Valley Economic Development Commission to tell them that if they succeed in their bold concept, I’ll put my money where my mouth is and start looking into buying property and moving there very quickly. It wouldn’t only be for the absence of chained addicts, but also for the whole philosophy that must go with it.
Jul 29, 2007 at 11:57 am
Oh, I see what’s going on here.
Common misconceptions #465456415:
Peace: noun, 1• pre-psychozoic era common definition: meaningless pseudo-objective ponctual maladaptative spacetime event described by the absence of uncontrolled environmental factor presupposing the omniscience and an absolute ability to predict the future of the two agents.
2• psychozoic era common definition: the recursive process of making and/or following a mutually beneficial agreement according to reason and prime(s) motivation(s) and circumstances.
..if I remember correctly..
Jul 29, 2007 at 12:06 pm
Frankly, I don’t care what another town is doing, the luddite can go live there, who care.
While they do that I’ll be using my iPhone and I’ll put it on stand-by mode when I don’t want to be bothered and let it take voicemail if need be and maybe hack in some function that will let the phone ring anyway if somebody send-me an urgent e-mail with a special word in the subject line. Then I’ll be able to sell my stocks on the spot if my informers tell me before everyone that the company I invested my last 5 millions dollars in is going broke in 5 days.
Jul 29, 2007 at 12:11 pm
That reminds me of my class on extropics processeses..
Jul 29, 2007 at 5:20 pm
My cell phone used to cause me a certain degree of anxiety. The problem was that my employer felt that she deserved access to me any time day or night, seven days a week. After a twelve hour work day, I would quite often get home to a forty minute phone call. If my phone was off, there would be questions. If I took a sick day, my phone would ring a couple of times to ask me inane questions.
Obviously I quit, but I had to endure quite a lot of it. Incidentally, I felt the most relaxed when my phone was off.
Now I have a new job, they only call me when it is important. I can enjoy it again.
SuperManâ„¢, watch the tone.
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