Would you risk your life for your cell phone? I wouldn’t, but there are those who would.
American media website CNET reported July 20 that a woman from Houston, Texas had a mugger threaten to shoot her on the street if she did not surrender her cell phone. When the woman refused she then crouched to the ground in preparation for the bullet. The man shot and just grazed the woman’s head before she ran to her friend’s house to escape.
It saddens me that people are both willing to kill and be killed for a small electronic device.
I understand that many may initially find this a tough choice. A cell phone could almost literally contain someone’s soul. There are pictures, videos, passwords, and deeply personal information stored on them, information that is permanent and not locked away in the safe haven of our minds. With all these thoughts we’ve filtered out through our fingers, some people may choose death over exposing their personal or even embarrassing self, such as the lady in the news report.
These concepts can even be applied to a broader scale. In some impoverished countries there are people who designate most of their money to maintaining a cell phone rather than to their own families.
I would have taken alternative routes to saving my information, and immediately realize that it’s just a cell phone.
A couple years back I travelled to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where I visited a couple of Brazilian slums, known as favelas. Knowing that technology is expensive in this city, I was shocked to realize that many people in these impoverished communities owned and maintained monthly cell phones, but could barely afford homes, or provide for their families.
“They really don’t need cell phones,” my Brazilian friend claimed. “They just choose to put what little money they have toward them.”
We must remind ourselves that our lives — our real lives — do not live in our technology. In an instance where one must choose between life and death over a cell phone, if one chooses death, technology has won that person over. The second, intangible self has become more important.
As beings who create technology, we must pride ourselves on maintaining dominance over it. And as much as I hate to say it, this means surrendering the cell phone, whether to a mugger, to live a healthier life, or in any other circumstance.
Heck, with the way our society has become so digitally-dependent, we would probably all take bullets for our technology if given the ultimatum!
Seriously, if I found myself in this woman’s shoes, I would have gladly surrendered my phone. Yes, there are personal conversations and information that I would not want others to witness, but in the end I would have taken alternative routes to saving my information, and immediately realize that it’s just a cell phone.
So, take a good look at your device. Would you be willing to die for it? Do you have deeply personal information on it that would influence this decision? Perhaps we should be finding alternative ways to express personal feelings or to store invaluable information, rather than putting it all into the digital system. Letters on paper or a face-to-face conversation may be more ideal.
Give the mugger the phone, and think about what really matters.
