Warning: Disconnect!

My mother called on Thursday. Our AT&T bill had jumped up thirty dollars and she wanted to know what  I had been "up to." Like many young Americans, I live in an era of suspended adulthood--my parents still help to pay the bills for tuition, rent, and some living expenses. My fiscal contribution, negligible at best, is the spending money I attempt to save from my campus job.

Growing up, my parents taught me the importance of respecting boundaries as well as fiscal responsibility. That said, knowing I have a limited texting plan, I ought to have remained well within the limit, monitoring my use. I know better. But, I did not; I ended up texting nearly double my limit. Thirty dollars is a small fortune to my near-minimum-wage salary, but for my parents, it is earned easily.  However, I still feel terrible. Yes, my parents bought me a phone and pay for my phone bill, but how many of my minutes or texts were actually spent on them? These days I'm so busy and socially engaged that I'll call my parents at best, once a day, or, more often than less, receive their calls wondering about my health, safety, and school.

Cellphone Usage Alert

Therefore, when I heard about the FCC's proposition to instate mandatory alerts to cellphone overages, I was interested. What better way to monitor cellphone usage than mandatory alerts? As stated in the New York Times articles, users would receive notifications before they reach their plan limit, when they reach their limit, and right after they pass their limit. That way, one could adjust their usage accordingly and anticipate or limit their future use. Sounds great, right?

Well. Not to the phone companies.

The wireless industry’s trade group, C.T.I.A.-The Wireless Association, argues that the F.C.C.’s proposal “violates carriers’ First Amendment protections”; it contends that compelling carriers to provide use alerts is a form of “compelled speech.” So, by this logic, the carriers should be allowed to remain silent while your phone gobbles up data bits beyond your plan’s allocation.

The industry says customers can check their current charges by going to their carrier’s Web site and looking them up — or by sending short codes on their phones or installing apps on their smartphones that can provide a tally of minutes and data use. And if customers don’t remember to check, the carriers can shrug and say, “Not our fault.”

Just great. While I agree cellphone users should be responsible with their own usage, extra reminders to monitor usage would really boost responsibility. Mandatory alerts would serve as a wake-up call when you become too caught up texting or going online on your handheld device. It would prompt you to don that mantle of responsibility, helping you realize whether you should adjust your usage or invest in an alternative texting/data plan (i.e. unlimited data plans). But then, a sickening realization hit me. It would really hurt profits for phone companies if we were responsible about our consumption of social technology.


In class we've discussed benefits and the many detrimental side effects of being constantly connected, but the one aspect we seem to have overlooked, perhaps, because we do not pay the bills, is the fiscal side. We may feel "good" being connected, but somewhere out there are marketers, phone carriers, and internet providers urging us to fall deeper into the abyss of social technology. So, while the FCC and CTIA wrangle this proposal indefinitely, we should start working on responsibly consuming social technology. As for me, please don't text me until next month.