Feeling Your Mobile As A Part Of Yourself?

If you are one of those people who are addict on their mobile phones, don’t get surprised if once you will feel your mobile vibration even though you will not have it on you. Such story happened to the manager at the public relations company Jonathan Zaback: one day when he was showing off his new Blackberry to the bunch of friends, he felt the mobile vibrating: “I reached down to grab it and realized there was no BlackBerry there”.

Zaback is one of those people who even sleep with their mobiles by their bed, checking them several times during the night, and waking up on the alarm of the mobile. "As long as it doesn't mean a tumor is growing on my leg because of my BlackBerry, I'm fine with it," he said. "Some people have biological clocks, I might have a biological BlackBerry”.

Although there is a lack of serious research in this respect, the given phenomenon is already known in scientific circles as “ringxiety” or “fauxcellarm”. The fact is, most mobile users already feel their favourite devices to be a part of themselves, just one more sensor organ “connecting” a human to the outside world, just like eyes, ears or nose. So to certain mobile addicts, the phantom vibrations are even a point of pride.

However, for most of the mobile users such occurings create lots of new problems. For example, the president and owner of e-ventsreg.com in New Jersey, Jeff Posner has seized wearing the mobile on his belt, to avoid the phantom vibrations. However after moving it to his chest pocket the mobile went further and began to dial one and the same number automatically. Posner explained such a phenomenon following way: "Phones have favorite friends," he said. "It's like your phones have a thing for each other. Of course, it's a female friend, so my wife is like, “You're calling her all the time."

Jake Ward, a former press secretary for Sen. Olympia Snowe and current director of Qorvis Communications Inc., a public relations company in Washington, D.C., claims he can pre-feel a call or a messige coming: "I'll feel it, look at it. It's not vibrating. Then it starts vibrating," he says. More than that: he had shifted the mobile from his belt to the jacket, but still feels the Blackberry on its previous place: "I am one with my BlackBerry."- Ward proudly comments.
The same happens to the “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams, who writes on his blog, dilbert.org, that he feels vibrations about 10 times a day, which means he got an e-mail with good news.
So the mobile phones can be even more “smart” then both their producers and consumers have dreamt on. Whether this is a good or bad news for the active users of mobiles, is a complicated question, and each person should decide it individually.

References:
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/10/11/phantom.vibrations.ap/index.html