Eliot Sherman: An unfathomable industry

Ah, college. The one place outside of Europe where everyone has a cell phone. I missed this. Especially the part where kids from such gangsta paradises as Beverly Hills assure their colleagues that they will be "hit up on the celly." In return, I always want to assure them that I will hit them up on their face, but I hold my tongue. I recently lost my cell phone, essentially because I'm an idiot, but that's a different story. The fun part is how I got a new one for free because all of you are suckers. Well, that's not fair. Ostensibly, it was because I renewed my contract and in return, received an old and busted, out of date piece of technology from last month. But the real reason is because you are all suckers. The cell phone industry is an example of a business that is almost 100 percent marketing. If you walk into a cellular store and look at the top five models, you will see that they are all phones. Some have bright colors or slightly different shapes or (and this is the cool part) flip-down screens. Some have half an hour more battery time. But they are all phones. And I'll tell you a secret. Whatever differences exist between models, for the most part, they're not worth the difference in price. So how does this industry survive, even flourish? Well, you know the answer to that. You know that somebody somewhere decided for all of us a while back that if your roommate had a smaller cell phone than you, well, that was just not something to be comfortable with. It seems to me that the cost is entirely arbitrary, and what we face is the product of media conglomerates getting together and deciding what the market will bear. The goal is to charge as much as possible without charging so much that precious consumers rebel and remember that phones without text messaging are just as capable of handling incoming calls. Do I sound bitter? Well, maybe I am. Maybe I should have gotten into this business a long time ago. Sure, a wireless network isn't something you can cobble together with some glue and a modem. But once you set that up, hire some technical support people, do some maintenance -- it's all profit. So much profit that Verizon could afford to pay its top five executives around $300 million combined. And all they had to do to afford this was fire 4,000 workers. A few weeks before Christmas. Hey, assholes. Can you hear me now? But what can I do? I am also a consumer. I'm attached to my bulky, out of date phone already. It's shiny. It's... precious to me. It also has more features than I'd ever need, including voice-activated dialing, a radio and a 145-page "how to" manual, which is really not that much since half of it consists of out clauses in the event of a lawsuit (do not stab yourself in eye with phone, do not swallow phone). It's so elaborate that there's even a section warning me that if I place my phone around the airbag of my car and said airbag deploys, I could face injury from the phone flying back at me. These guys think of everything. Plus, in paying phone companies more money than they deserve, I'm being patriotic. Supporting American industry. Helping to rebuild the economy. Except that columbite-tantalite, a rare type of mineral that, in processed form, is a vital component in cell phones, is available in only one part of the world -- the war-torn Congo region. Miners work the wildly hazardous and poorly maintained mines and sell their product to various rebel factions who, in turn, sell directly to various international mineral companies. Needless to say, contention for these lucrative sources of income isn't resolved through group discussion. In fact, there seems to be very little democracy in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but that's a different column. Cell phones also tend to lead to delightful human behavior, such as the use of these so called "hands-free units" which allow a person to talk without actually holding a phone. You know, for those times when you're doing the responsible thing and chatting away while driving on the highway. So except for overpaying, fueling a civil war, contributing to auto accidents and of course, the as-yet-unknown possibility of developing brain cancer from overexposure, owning a cell phone is working out just fine for me. And I would put my money where my mouth is and throw mine out the window -- except for the simple fact that I'm getting insanely good at this Snake game. Eliot Sherman is a sophomore from Philadelphia, Pa.

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