Yesterday, as I walked across campus, I tried a little experiment: I counted the number of people I saw talking on cell phones. Throughout the afternoon, as I dashed in and out of libraries and cafeterias, I counted 62 people walking alone, cell phones glued to their ears; 39 people walking in pairs or triplets, in which at least one person was talking on a cell phone; 28 people walking in pairs or triplet, actually talking to each other, not to some other party on the phone; and 7 people by themselves, phoneless. (At least, I think they were phoneless. Maybe they were using those barely-visible ear pieces.) Those numbers don't include the people I saw sitting on benches, waiting for buses, or just taking in the fine fall day. Most of them were on cell phones, too.

What do these numbers mean? Simply that the college population is just like everyone else. We're all on cell phones, all the time. 71 percent of American households claim at least one cell phone. In 2004, Americans crossed a telephonic threshold — cell phones now outnumber conventional land lines.

The new technological landscape calls for a new etiquette, and that new etiquette doesn't seem to be in place yet. I've endured people answering their cell phones in movies theaters and in lecture halls. Is it OK to disturb everyone's peace and quiet on a late-night commuter train with your yakking? Is it OK to bellow into your cell phone when squeezed onto a small commuter plane? Is it OK to ignore flight attendants' instructions to shut off your cell phone because that plane needs to take off?

If you think that last query is absurd, think again. Last June, a passenger on a US Airways flight from Miami to Philadelphia refused to curtail her call when it was time for the plane to depart. She said it would be rude to hang up on her friend. The standoff turned tense, the passenger wound up smacking a federal air marshal, and was ultimately taken off the plane in handcuffs.

I think it quite worrying that we have become a nation — and in my microcosm, a campus — full of cell phone users. If I were queen for day, I would ban the things, and I encourage you to think about shoving yours in a drawer, to be brought out only for emergency use during a hypothetical car breakdown on a cross-country drive.

Now, before you dismiss me as a total Luddite, let me acknowledge the wonderful aspects of cell phone technology. I got my first cell phone in January 2002, when I moved from New York to Virginia, and all those free long-distance minutes helped me stay in touch with my New York buddies. And when I'm stuck in traffic or cruising on the interstate, my cell-phone allows me to multi-task and maximize my time. (Never mind the risk I pose to myself and anyone who might have to take care of me if I have a wreck and become a paraplegic: studies show that cell phone talkers are much more likely to have an accident than drivers who are not talking on the phone. The problem is not ameliorated by handless phones, because what causes the accidents is distraction, not lack of manual dexterity.)

But wait! Even there in the list of things I love about cell phones is something that should give us pause. What do I like about my phone? Not only that it may (or may not) offer a cost-efficient way of keeping up with far-flung friends — but that is allows me to use my time as productively as possible.

The problem is the approach to time that cell phones foster. Cell phones tell us that time is something to be used, maximized. We are to squeeze into a single hour, a single moment, as much as we possibly can. Even the verbs we use for time are telling; we use time, spend time, maximize time, save time — all metaphors drawn from finance! In the 19th century, people didn't speak of spending or maximizing time; they spoke of passing the time. Today if someone said they'd passed their weekend on the front-porch you would think their locution quaint and charming and a tad odd. And a person who passes the time would not likely laud cell phones for their ability to wring every second of productivity from an hour. A person who passes the time might enjoy looking at the scenery she was driving though, or might take the minutes of gridlock as an opportunity to pray.

What I'm getting at is this: cell phones, for all their benefits, have distorted both how we inhabit time and how we go about being embodied people.

Two stories may help make the point concrete. About a year ago, I was standing in line at the drugstore. The gal in front of me was talking on her cell phone. I (naively) assumed that when she got to the front of the line, she would hang up, or at least put her cell phone down. I was wrong. Where her turn came, Cell Phone Gal stayed stuck to her cell phone, paying for her gum, magazines, and lip gloss without so much as a hello to the cashier. It occurred to me that our gal was treating the person, the cashier, like a machine, and treating the machine like a person. (For that matter, Cell Phone Gal's interlocutor certainly wasn't getting her undivided attention; we've all had the annoying experience of talking to someone who's trying to do three things at once.)

A few weeks later, I was in my car, waiting in the drive- through queue at my local bank. In the shiny red SUV in front of me were two women, a driver and a passenger who both looked to be in their early 20s. Both were talking on cell phones. I wondered, What is the point? Why be with another real, embodied person if you're going to talk to someone else on the phone?

My disembodiment thesis got a further jolt when I read a Wall Street Journal article about Bluetooth, the small headsets — not actually plugged to a phone — that are increasingly popular. One devotee of Bluetooth summed up his love for the new technology this way: "It is like my third earlobe." Creepy!

A friend of mine who works in publishing in New York tells me she believes cell phones are partially to blame for the decline in American reading. "People used to read on the train as they commuted to work," she said. "Now they talk on the phone."

When I look around campus and see all the cell phones, I am struck by the sad thought that we are no longer ever alone. We have eroded all the space we once had for solitude. I've had some of my best conversations with myself, and with God, strolling across campus. Now, when we stroll, we are talking into tiny bits of plastic — and most of what we're saying is pretty lame. ("Well, I'm about 10 seconds from the library ... yep, now I'm walking up the library steps ... no, okay, well here I am entering the library, I'll see you in three seconds.") Is solitude so scary that we have made it impossible? Solitude is scary, but scarier still is the prospect of a society in which no one has time to be quiet, to be reflective.

When we buy into cell phones, we may be really buying into a cultural story that is much bigger than your average clam-shell. We may be buying into a story that tells us that all hours of the day are identical, that there's no right or good way to order time — 8 hours a day for work-related calls, for example, but peace and quiet and time for friends and family after 5 pm. We may be buying into a story that is essentially Gnostic, that tells us that our minds, our attention and our conversations should be focused on a person in another city, instead of on the person right next to us. We may be buying into a story that tells us never to be tranquil or still. We may be buying into a story that praises "connectivity" but yanks us out of the small corner of the world we happen to inhabit today. I love talking to my friends in New York, but surely I ought not do so at the expense of connecting to the small patch of campus I'm walking across in Durham, North Carolina, this very afternoon.

I have a vexed relationship with my own cell phone. The flip side of convenience is invasiveness, and though I appreciate my phone's convenience, I hate the idea that people can get hold of me any time of day or night. I hate the thought that while I'm sleeping, messages that need responding to are piling up. My reaction is far from commendable — I basically ignore the messages, and keep my cell phone off most of the time, and so the messages do pile up, and somewhere out there are people who think I'm ignoring them, when really I'm just ignoring my phone.

I'm not alone in my dislike. A 2004 poll found that a third of all Americans name cell phone as the invention they most hate, but cannot live without.

I may try to live without one yet. This month, actually, I'm in the middle of a little test: I am either going to start using my cell phone better, more regularly — checking the messages, for example, and attempting to return at least some portion of the calls — or I am going to get rid of it. I'll let you know what I decide. In the meantime, the best way to reach me is to send me an email. (Actually, I have some concerns about email too, but I'll save those thoughts for another day ...)