I hate the Motorola RAZR (pictured above for those of you who have been living in a cave for the last few years). Until approximately 10 AM GMT on May 24, 2006, I was convinced that this hatred was pure, unrelenting, and eternal, admitting of no exceptions or qualifications. I indiscriminately referred to strangers using wielding this hypersleek mobile phone as “Douchebags”, and regaled any of my friends unfortunate enough to have purchaced it with long, moderately incoherent tirades about how using the RAZR was a crime against society. I even once circulated a petition attempting to get Cingular to pull the RAZR from the menu of phones available with However, as I was in the line at Heathrow boarding my flight to Nairobi (or I guess over there, they’d call it a queue, but hey, who’s keeping score), the man in front of me was using a RAZR, and I thought to myself, “Self, That’s pretty awesome.” What made this RAZR different from all other RAZRs was that its owner was holding a Kenyan passport in his other hand.
On the face of it I appear to be quite the hypocrite; my staunch anti-RAZR beliefs were easily washed away by the first Kenyan citizen I saw using one. Maybe I’m even a closeted RAZR-lover whose position was in fact thinly veiled self-loathing. Looking even a little deeper, my fascination with this subject is vaguely orientalist; the RAZR, the sleekest most hypermodern cell phone of them all, is only cool to me when it is wielded by a citizen of a country whose daily headlines frequently include reports of cattle rustling, armed banditry, and tribal conflict. All issues of ethnocentrism or whatever aside, this contrast is fascinating; and in someways its both troubiling and intriguing that in a country wracked by drought, famine, and disease epidemics, even residence of the most rural areas have cell phones.
An alternative hypothesis is that what I hate about the RAZR is something culturally specific to America; and is more likely to actually be about our society than it is about a stupid phone. My hatred of this phone was engendered two years ago by a thick-necked Cingular employee who thought it looked cool for him to pop the collar of his tight black polo shirt and bleach the tips of his spiked brown hair. When I approached the register to puchase my humble, entry-level clunker of a phone, Sir Cingular looked at me with a gaze that approached pity. “You don’t want to buy that; that’s no phone. This… This is a phone”, he proclaimed, brandishing the RAZR from his belt holster. From that moment on, I have seen the RAZR as an metonym for much of the arrogance, materialism, and statatus obsession that irk me about mainstream American culture. Out of this context, the RAZR was drained of its symbolism and became simply a sexy sexy block of plactic and wires.
While these explanations are certainly plausible, none of them stand up to the standard of Parsimony, that vaunted method of evaluating scientific theories by favoring the one that can explain the most variation in the most simple way. What then is the most, elegant, concise explanation for my sudden willingness to grant the 1,547th RAZR user I’ve seen clemency, wheareas the prior 1,546 had not been spared my derision? A combination of terrible British airline food (and attendant stomach cramps), the beginnings of jet lag brought about by the deadly combination of a 5 hour time difference and a turbulent 5.5 hour flight, and a general feeling of personal griminess left me desperately grasping for some, any bright spot, and the gentleman with RAZR happened to simply be in the right place at the right time to reinvigorate me for the last leg of my trip. At the very least by inspiring me to write this diatribe, it gave me a way to burn a fraction of my 8 hour flight (OMG, I’M SO META!!!!!!!1).
No comments:
Post a Comment