Their Numbers Are Dropping - the Cellphone Refuseniks - NYTimes.com

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By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Not so long ago, we all lived in a world in which we decided where to meet friends before leaving the house and we hiked to the nearest payphone if we got a flat tire. Then we got cellphones.

Well, not everyone. For a hardy few that choose to ignore cellphones, life is a pocketful of quarters, missed connections and a smug satisfaction of marching to a different ring tone.

For Linda Mboya, 32, who lives in Brooklyn and works on arts and education programs at a nonprofit group, it also involves never letting sleeping dogs lie.

A friend who lives on the top floor of a house in Brooklyn has a perpetually broken apartment buzzer. So Ms. Mboya makes noise to disturb the dogs who live on the first floor, who then bark and announce her arrival to her friend.

“This system works pretty well,” Ms. Mboya said, though the dogs’ owners might disagree.

For many people, cellphones have become indispensable appendages that make calls, deliver e-mail messages, locate restaurants and identify the song on the radio. After 20 years, 85 percent of adult Americans have cellphones, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. According to the Federal Communications Commission, cellphones caught on faster than cable TV and personal computers although, by some accounts, broadband Internet service was adopted faster.

Those who still do not have them, according to Pew, tend to be older or less educated Americans or those unable to afford phones. “These are people who have a bunch of other struggles in their lives and the expense of maintaining technology and mastering it is also pretty significant for them,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew project.

But there is also a smaller subset of adults who resist cellphones simply because they do not want them. They resent the way that ring tones, tiny keyboards and screens disrupt face-to-face conversation. They savor their moments alone and prize the fact that no one knows how to reach them.

“It’s a luxury not to be reached when I’m out and about,” said Gregory Han, a 34-year-old writer and editor living in Los Angeles. Life for him is a lot more planned than most, the consequence of not having a cellphone — or even a landline — at home.

When his mother recently went to the hospital, the family’s communication plan went into action: his mother called his sister, who sent him an instant message on his computer, to which he replied with a call using Skype over the Web. When he travels for work, he prepares his boss with a list of ways to reach him and colleagues to call if he is unreachable, a modern-day version of Tony Roberts’s neurotic character giving minute-by-minute updates of where he would be reachable in the pre-BlackBerry era of Woody Allen’s “Play It Again, Sam.”

Far from being technology-resistant, Mr. Han makes a living blogging about interior design and tech gadgets. He initially got rid of his cellphone to save money, but “I feel I benefit by living in the moment and not having a ring or a buzz or an inclination to always look at the screen.”

These cellphone “refuseniks” probably account for less than 5 percent of those who do not have cellphones, said John Horrigan, consumer research director at the National Broadband Task Force. Though many cellphone owners express growing displeasure about cellphones’ intrusions into their lives, according to Pew, a tiny and most likely shrinking number actually manage to resist them completely.

“Ambivalent networkers bristle at all their gadget-facilitated connectivity, but don’t give it up,” Mr. Horrigan said. “The cell refuseniks are making a statement that they control their availability.”

The painstaking plans that people without cellphones must make to navigate the world show just how dependent the rest of us have become on our phones.

Ms. Mboya always picks a time and a landmark to meet friends and carries quarters in case she has to use a payphone.

Still, her friends are not used to planning their social lives in advance. A recent brunch date required several three-way planning phone calls among Ms. Mboya and two friends. “I can only do that periodically,” said Sheila Shirazi, one of the friends. “I don’t have the time and energy to coordinate to the extent it takes with somebody who isn’t mobile. It’s just not something I’m used to.”

And even the best-laid plans falter. Jenna Catsos, 22, does not have a cellphone because she thinks the idea of always being reachable is “scary” and prefers to keep in touch with handwritten letters. While at college in rural Vermont, Ms. Catsos decided to drive to Massachusetts to surprise her father for his birthday. Halfway there, her car’s transmission broke down. She walked half a mile to the nearest gas station and called her parents from the payphone, but because they were not expecting her, they were not home. After leaving a message with the payphone number, she stood in the gas station parking lot for an hour waiting for them to call back.

“It’s situations like that when I would really love to have a phone,” she said. That might happen sooner than she would like, because she will start looking for a new job this winter and stay on friends’ couches for a few weeks, without her own landline. “It’s really getting impossible not to have one.”