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Welcome to the future:  Like it or not, cell phones are here to stay.

Just try to find a pay phone.  If you’re in Paris and can actually find a cabine, your money is worthless.  You’ll need a télécarte, a plastic phone card you can buy at any of the city’s ubiquitous tabacs that also sell cigarettes, parking cards, books of Métro cards, stamps, and lotto tickets.

When you walk into the phone booth, the odds are it will smell like a urinal. Clochards, Parisian street people, have a right to a modicum of privacy, after all.  Naturally, most people make their calls and then bolt as fast as they possibly can.  And probably head to the nearest store selling cell phones.  (There is no truth to the rumor that cell manufacturers are encouraging the clochards.)

They don’t need to.  As of 2005, there were 2,168,433,600 cell phones worldwide—one for every three people.  That number has grown because of wider availability and increased competition. It doesn’t hurt sales that many people carry two mobiles, one for business, the other for personal use. Or maybe to call themselves.

Cell phone growth has been especially swift in the developing world because it is more efficient to launch satellites and put up towers than to string tens of thousands of miles of cable for land lines. Parts of Africa, for example, have leap-frogged much of the West in their adaptation of mobile phones.  In some places, one person with a cell will rent it out by the minute to those who cannot afford one.

To put it more globally, telecommunications have assumed a new meaning when it comes to conducting business or just living your life, and owning a cell phone is no longer considered a luxury only the rich can afford. 

Like any new technology, the cell phone has produced a debate centering on its intrinsic negatives.  It is a menace when drivers use them without an earphone—or even with one.  Drivers aren’t keeping either their eyes or their minds on the roads, and the number of accidents caused by people on phones has skyrocketed.  And that’s not counting the mayhem caused by people e-mailing or texting on their Blackberrys.

Cell phone etiquette is not quite an oxymoron, but it is in its infancy, at best.  It is annoying, and weird, to walk down the street and hear someone complaining loudly about her boyfriend’s shortcomings or a salesman trying to close the deal or at least “take it to the next level” at the top of his lungs. It is even stranger to see people wearing a Bluetooth in their ears and appearing to be talking (and usually gesticulating) to themselves.  It makes me want to cross the street. 

I used to rationalize taking taxis in Paris because I was hearing more fluent French from the drivers who never got off their cells even to greet me and jabbered away for the whole ride.  No longer since most of them don’t speak French on the phone.

My own favorite story:  I was in a grocery store and heard a woman scream “Oh, my God.” I ran over to her, saw she was about 10 months pregnant and got ready to race her to the hospital.  She laughed at my horror and explained (sort of) that she had just heard a some really great gossip.  I fear for her child.

Actually, I fear for all children.  Imaginarium, a toy company, and Spain’s Telefónica have begun marketing kiddie phones.  Program them for speed dialing grandma, they tell us, and the child will have improved socialization, better emotional health, and the parents will have greater peace of mind.

Of course the companies will have a greater piece of the market—by creating it.  With adults becoming habituated to cell phones (and how many people want to have three of them?), kids are the next frontier.  Get them when they’re young is a marketing mantra that worked for cigarette companies for years (remember Joe Camel?), so why not here?

This has caught the attention of Jóvenes Verdes, head of an environmental advocacy group for young people in Spain, who argues that “the mobile industry is acting like the tobacco industry by designing products that addict the very young.”

Researchers point out that there is inadequate long-term knowledge about the negative effects on health of cell phone use, including especially the impact of radio frequency electromagnetic fields emitted from mobile phones on the developing brains of the young.

France’s health minister, Roselyne Bachelot, has issued an alert urging parents to limit their children’s cell phone calls to no more than six minutes.

Maybe she should just tell them to hang up and live.

© Paris New Media, LLC

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