Apparently I'm not alone. According to the former executive editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, ICT-savvy people are making conscious choices about which tech appliances to avoid and which to employ, along the lines of how, when, where, why and to what extent. For them, having it all is not paradise, but paradise lost. Privacy, for many, is still important, despite obvious trends in the opposite direction, ranging from over exposure -- both physically and psychologically -- on Internet sites like MySpace, to publicly enacted, "private" cell phone conversations and emotional undressing. Despite what some may think, most lives, even in crisis, are not that compelling.

It is probably no surprise to you that research shows that most of these who are hanging on to private spaces and, to further cliché a new cliché, cherishing their cones of silence, are the over-30 crowd, especially those who didn't grow up with the cornucopia of wireless devices in the 21st century communication palette. Consequently, they can and do easily imagine a world where the devices do not rule; where some cognitive maps have no BlackBerry roadside rests.

For those resisting, say, the cell phone's siren call but find that some of its convenience desirable or even, given their work, mandatory, there are strategies to be conjured: At a most basic level there are, of course, people who sign up for the Full Monty of a 24/7 cell phone embrace, receive their first phone bill, savor a cardiac moment and in one Panzer-like strike, cut back their use of cell phones and all the ancillary bells, whistles, and expenses that smart phones are now heir to including overage and TM and discover they're saving well over a hundred dollars per month, really don't need to take pictures of their 5-year old chasing a duck into poison ivy, and they can wait till they get home to surf the net or read the online WSJ.

Others control the temptation by simply leaving the phone at home when the work day is over and go out into the world, untethered and unconnected. Some restrict who has a cell phone number to minimize unwanted and/or costly intrusions when "off the clock." A small group may choose to purchase and carry an emergency only cell phone. This provides the option of emergency calls but stonewalls most anyone else from getting through. Still others make the choice of leaving the phone on "off," using if only for checking messages and making outgoing calls.

Then there are those, sensitive to traditional social norms of acceptable behavior, who switch the phone to the "vibrate only" mode so they know they're getting a call but others they're with don't feel like they're about to be put on hold. In such situations these well-mannered, non-conditioned, salivation-resistant role models generally do not immediately answer calls vibrationally announced. They wait for a natural break in the conversation before checking messages and decide to whom and when to return the calls. Sometimes this is known as phone etiquette.

For the nearly-addicted, the have the option of keeping all the bells and whistles, paying the monthly tithes, but restrict themselves to checking incoming messages on some fixed time interval like every 30 minutes in some area of cell phone purgatory, analogous to what smokers do outside most public buildings.

There are ways to tame the culturally birthed phone gene, if one wants to.

Wireless etiquette and its violation is probably the most visible expression of an emergence of social norms in the wireless age of ICT. In its own way, for example, the cell phone mimes the clashing of public normative behavior seen in the boom box era, now a mostly unlamented memory. Back then, people, again mostly young people, walked the streets shouldering 20 inch-plus wide boom boxes, providing noise pollution for anyone within a 2-block radius. It just seemed as though they were proclaiming, "This is me. This is my music. I will seduce or irritate you. I don't really care. Just pay attention to me! I need to be and I need to be seen, because I haven't really done much with my life just yet to otherwise get your attention."

Thankfully, mercifully, this pandemic noise riot was soon replaced by Sony's Walkman sensation (and later Apple's iPod) and public air pollution became privatized. Even the polluters found lugging around the box a burden. And for the traveling shock waves reaching out from the uber bass speakers in cars, public outrage and decibel range laws subdued these sound polluters and their desperate self-advertising.

Today the cell phone is promising the same ego-centric assault on public sensibilities-and changing public sensibility norms in the process. People seem totally comfortable having private conversations in public places, conversations which are rarely interesting or welcome to bystanders. Or they stand in line as a checker is scanning their groceries and give the checker nary an acknowledgment, as if to say "You're not important or worthy or human enough for me to pay any attention to you at all." This agora rudeness has gotten so bad that some stores are forbidding cell phone conversations in line as checkers have been complaining to management to "do something, I'm not their @#$$%% servant!"

The outrage list goes on: People talk on phones as they are waiting at the light and roll into crossing passengers, to whom they are often quite oblivious and often find this pedestrian encounter most bothersome and intruding into their conversation. They talk in restaurants, waiting rooms, jury rooms, airplanes, reading rooms, oblivious to the fact that they are annoying others, intruding on quiet time, reading time, non-wired time.

Sadly, more phone danger is just over the horizon: Cell phone users and their service providers are petitioning to be able to deploy cell phone cluster bombs of endless chatter on airlines once the plane has reached cruising level and "the captain has turned off the seat belt sign." Now, I predict, that'll be the start of a real war between the rude and oblivious and the rest of the non-wired populace.

But it's a gambit by profit-seeking phone companies and compulsive talkers that might not succeed. Only by having a sound-protected area (a cell phone cordon sanitaire) in the plane for those to enter and make their calls, could the airline avoid a noisy, media-saturated, mass revolt of the other passengers who somehow, enigmatically, are able to find other ways to pass the flying time without gaming the phone's speed dial to find someone - anyone --to talk to (and you know who you are!). Moreover, you can be sure that free range cell phoning on some airlines will trigger competitors who will offer passengers the option to keep the friendly skies cell phone-free.

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Tags: 21st century communication, appliances, cell phone conversations, cell phones, communications technology, cones, conscious choices, cornucopia, crowd, executive editor, human culture, ict, internet sites, kevin kelly, media psychology, mso, myspace, orphan, private spaces, style definitions, style name, technology devices, times new roman