Cell Phone Companies may be Getting away with Murder. For Real.

I think of myself as a man of the 21st century. I have a job in the media and own a fair amount of gadgetry. But one gadget I use sparingly is my cell phone. This is in spite of the fact that my friends get on my case for not having the thing turned on all the time. A sense of entitlement has developed surrounding the cell phone: my friends think that they are entitled to be able to reach me at any time they please.

But, my refusal to keep my phone on is in no way connected with my desire for a little quiet or a preference for the “simple life”. Rather, I am afraid of the radiation produced by the devices and what it may do to my brain in the near or long term. Once upon a time, radiation was a big issue: people were concerned that they would get brain cancer from using mobile phones, and radiation was one of the biggest reasons at least some people gave for refusing to adopt mobile technology. However, as usually happens, nay Sayers get steamrolled by the momentum of new technology and, while they are asleep, the whole world moves ahead.

If there are nay Sayers still out there, please speak up. Cell phones still give off lots of radiation, but the way we communicate has changed.

Which is exactly what the cell phone companies (be they manufacturers, service providers or the rapidly expanding industry that is set to make a fortune off of applications designed for cell phones) wanted in the first place. Critical mass was achieved long ago, cell phones are a big business and surely the cell companies are aware of the fact that a scare involving radiation and its effects could have a massive negative effect on their business.

Or, would it? Cell phones have become such an integral part of our lives, especially the lives of young people for whom cell phones are as natural as television was for my generation, that life without them is almost inconceivable.

I have no scientific evidence to prove the little devices do or do not cause disease. However, the fact that they send off microwave radiation – the same form of energy used to reheat day-old pizza in a microwave oven – directly into our heads and from very close range gives me reasonable grounds to be concerned. Radiation was once feared by many but that fear is now buried deep in our collective subconscious. It’s time we took a hard look at what the real threat may be.

Several years ago the issue of radiation made the front pages in Israel. For a few months everyone was concerned about the dangers cell phones could pose, and the government started to look into the issue. At some point, however, the two major cell service providers at the time, Cellcom and Pelephone, offered to help the government out, and kindly take the burden of researching the effects of cell phone radiation on the human body.

The result of their research? No one knows. The project seems to have disappeared. Over the years cell phone penetration has reached 95% in Israel. People speak on the phones for hours every day. Many people don’t have land line phones anymore, preferring to simplify their lives with a single, mobile phone.

Are they in danger? Maybe. One thing we can be sure of, however, is that mobile phone operators are making a huge profit. It may take many years before it is determined whether cell phones really are a danger, just like it took decades before enough evidence connecting smoking to lung cancer became available to prove the cause and effect relationship. Are cell phones the cigarette smoke of our age? I don’t know, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Verizon or Cingular become the Philip Morris of the future.

A nudge into the present

Today is a landmark day in my life. Not because it marks one year that I’ve been at my current job (which, by the way, it does), or because I've accomplished some great achievement in the pursuit of world peace. This is a great day because I won a free iTune with my Pepsi.

I’ve never purchased a tune online in my life, and my experience with the old free file-sharing Napster was cut short by some judge who deemed the business illegal (I was late jumping on that boat). I’ve never bothered to buy songs online because I can’t see forking out 12 bucks or so to buy twelve tunes that constitute and album when, for a couple of bucks more, or many dollars less if I use my BMG Music Club membership, I can get a plastic case and cool album art to go along with the sound. Which, by the way, is of much higher quality than the MP3 format that I can download.

But Apple, the company that has so kindly offered me the free song through its iTunes website, is very smart. Since I opened my Pepsi this afternoon I’ve spent part of my day wondering what song I’ll choose. Since I only get one free song, it had better be a good one. I think I’m going to go for Bob Dylan, a song that I’ve heard of, am curious about but don’t know, like “Bye and Bye.” Of course, the fact that I’d even consider Bob Dylan over 50 Cent probably makes it easy to understand that my avoidance of iTunes thus far hasn't been just about sound quality or money. Figure this one out yourselves, the big generational/culture gap thing. Yet, Apple got me thinking all afternoon, and at some point within the next few days I’m going to surf to iTunes and figure out how to legally download music over the internet and a barrier will be laid low. Just like when I swore that I’d never get a cell phone but now wouldn’t be without one. Or when, as a kid, I thought touch-tone phones were just the latest fad (I picked that one up from my stuffy techno-phobe parents).

Itunes falls in the same category of life-changing technological experience. By giving me a freebie, Apple has gently nudged me into a new era that I wouldn’t have entered of my own volition. They know my world will never be the same.

A giant's visions of grandeur

General Motors just announced that the first quarter of 2005 was its worst in 13 years. This comes as no surprise considering that the bulk of the auto behemoth’s earnings come from the sale of SUVs, a market that has been on the wane for close to a year. Blame rising gas prices as well as growing concerns over the vehicles’ safety, a one-two punch that won’t stop stinging, especially since China’s voracious appetite for oil makes higher oil prices from here to eternity a sure thing.

You can’t blame GM for circling the wagons and insisting that the SUV market will regain momentum, at least publicly. All hopes for profitability depend on sales of the large vehicles. But what’s disturbing is the company’s lack of an attractive range of regular cars that can pick up the slack as models like the Chevrolet Suburban and Cadillac Escalade build up on dealers’ lots. To make mattes worse, GM’s leaders, including new CEO Rick Wagoner, aren’t just mouthing support for their bread and butter SUV lines, they’re putting their money where their mouth is. Wagoner recently announced that he would scale back the development of new cars in favor of accelerating the development of next-generation SUVs, a strategy that seems so obviously doomed to failure that it leaves one asking just what GM’s brass has been smoking.

SUV sales have about as much chance of rebounding as Pope Benedict XVI has of distributing condoms to visitors to the Vatican. Companies like Honda and Toyota, not normally associated with innovation, may turn out to be the wise industrial sages of our time if the current demand for hybrids like the Prius continues to grow. The demand for more fuel efficient vehicles is not to be taken lightly: even Ford has gotten into the game with its new Escape SUV hybrid, albeit with technology bought from Toyota.

GM does have an answer for an energy-scarce future, although its plan seems as unrealistic as its devotion to the SUV. The company has emphasized its intent to develop hydrogen powered cars that will be ready in the middle of the next decade. Never mind the fact that the company will have to simultaneously develop a whole family of technologies to make hydrogen cars reality, or the fact that the production of hydrogen fuel actually uses about as much energy as gasoline does in the first place. This seems to be a desperate effort by GM to leapfrog hybrid technology, where it lags, while trying to convince the world that hydrogen is the real key to the future. Hydrogen may ultimately prove to be much more than fantasy, but GM’s belief that it will someday regain technological leadership in the automotive industry by developing hydrogen is a deception that fools very few people outside of the company’s corporate board room. By the time hydrogen does become reality, GM could very well be long gone.

Latest as of April 19

Coney Island may have a new face in the coming years, according to today's New York Times. Land developers are buying up stalls that housed arcades and hot dog stands for a new shopping center that would be complete with an indoor swimming pool. This is another example of mall-ization, although whether this is necessarily a bad thing is up for debate.

I have to make it clear that I have only been to Coney Island once in my life, during a bright, crisp winter day in February when I decided to bicycle all the way from my apartment on the upper West Side, a ride that took two hours but resulted in my finally seeing the fabled boardwalk that I'd heard vague mention of all of my life, the namesake of many a chili covered hot dog I ate way back in my Midwestern high school cafeteria.

No more than a few casual strollers wandered the boardwalk that afternoon. Hearty souls who, like me, dared the cold temperatures just to enjoy a bit of bright sun and shatter the dreariness of a long New York winter. I'd always imagined that Coney Island was a shady anachronism, populated by freak shows with bearded ladies and sword swallowers. My hunch, I believe, was dead on. Even though I didn't actually see any of these types during the course of the afternoon, the hot dog stands and arcades, all boarded up for winter, and the motionless ferris wheel, nevertheless made it plainly obvious that had I come on a summer day or, even better, a hot Saturday evening, I would have seen exactly the creatures, and heard the very sounds, of Coney Island lore.

But, what I hadn't counted on was the utter grayness of the place. The beach was wide and the sand soft and light brown, but landward, opposite the broad, wood-plank boardwalk were huge apartment blocks, lined up in rows, that looked like they belonged to some Iron Curtain country save for the fact that they had been constructed of brick rather than cement. The sensation of being dreadfully close to a gulag was reinforced by the fact that I was one of the few people on the boardwalk that didn't speak Russian as a first language. My overall sense was that I really had left the USA for some bleak eastern block excuse for a tourist destination, mixed in with what I identified as a real sense of culture shock.

Coney Island may be completely different during the summer. I imagine the wide open, barren boardwalk would be rich with the smell of hamburgers and fries and coconut suntan oil, colorful lights from the ferris wheel, screams of children playing on the beach, whistles from groups of young men looking to score. An unsavory, whimsical place, one that has so far been spared sterilization, a fate that, I am told, has terminally altered even Las Vegas. Coney Island has become the type of place that any upstanding middle-class parent concerned about the correct moral development of a child would avoid at all costs. Once upon a time this place must have held a real appeal. These days, for many, it's rogue charisma probably holds all the allure of a trip to the local land fill.

Which brings me around to the question I never answered: Is the proposed development of Coney Island, replete with chain restaurants and air conditioned hallways, a good thing? Mall-ization will surely bring out the masses (as Las Vegas' castrated reconfiguration has demonstrated). It would even make me more likely to take a trip there on a Saturday night - the mall and the shops would be appealing, while the current hot dogs and the fat dancing ladies would seem more like a gimmic, good for one visit and then, maybe, another when friends come to town, an attraction that they must see, but they wouldn't want to live there, if you catch my drift.

So, would it be better for Coney Island to remain as a link to yester-year's preference for seedy entertainment, or modernize and draw the crowds as well as money, which could even be further invested in the place to make look a whole lot less like...summer in Siberia?