April 23, 2007--Atwitter

At 10,000 feet and descending to West Palm Beach there was an announcement to turn off all electronic devices. At touch-down there was another that said the use of cell phone was now permitted. One could feel the plan rocking back and forth on its wheels as at least two-thirds of the passengers squirmed in their seats to retrieve their phones and Blackberrys. In an instant there was a cacophony of electronic beeps as these devices sprang to life.

The woman seated directly behind me placed a call, “Yes, we just landed. I’ll call you back.” She hung up. As the plane taxied toward the gate she placed another call, apparently to the same person, “We’re getting close to the gate. I’ll call again.” Once more she rang off. The plane slowed to a crawl, came to a halt, and the engines were quickly switched off. “Hello. It’s me again. We’re at the gate. I’ll call you later.”

She and we retrieved our luggage from the overhead compartment and with her still behind us we entered the terminal. I couldn’t hear her anymore in the crowded waiting area but she was once again placing a call and I can only imagine that she must have been saying, “I’m in the terminal and heading for the exit. I’ll call again.”

So when I read about a new, free communications service called Twitter, I assume my plane-mate would be among the first to sign up. It allows Twitterers to send and receive short text messages at no cost via the Web or cell phones. For the most part, Tweets in response to the prompt “What are you doing?” are routed among networks of friends and strangers called Followers who can tune into Tweets from people who they find interesting. (See NY Times article linked below.)

I suppose this means that my traveling companion, if she was using her cell phone to send Tweets, could have be letting thousands of folks know that the plane was at the gate. And I think I now know what most of the people I see in the street every day glued to the cell phones are “communicating” to their friends, children, and parents—“Hi. I’m on my way to class. I’ll call you when I get there.” Or, “Yes, it’s chilly out. I’m happy I wore my jacket.” Or, “There’s this really neat red car that just drove by. I think it was a Beemer.”

We know what happened last week when the Blackberry network went down for 10 hours. Many Blackaholics reported that they nearly had nervous breakdowns, literally, during the time that they were cut off from their e-mails and whatever.

And we also seem to be discovering that a major reason that nearly half the honey bees in the U.S. have died off is because the wireless signals emitted by cell phone towers are interfering with the bees’ ability to navigate back and forth to their hives. This may not seem as important as all the Twittering; but when a pound of peaches costs $50, it may be the result of everyone wanted to know when our plane landed.