Several weeks ago Apple Inc. introduced the iPhone (and with it a name change from Apple Computer, Inc.) and tried to turn the cell phone world upside down. The iPhone is supposed to be technology done right (or technology Apple-style, depending on whether you like or loathe the company.) Ignoring the technological analysis, the iPhone raises several significant issues about modern electronic gadgetry and American culture in general.

Apple and other technology companies have spent the previous 30 years trying to better connect people by spending more time in front of screens and interfacing with people in impersonal ways like e-mail, instant messengers and Web sites. Herein lies a major technological paradox: my brother who lives in Spain frequently uses Google Chat to talk to a friend in Chicago. In fact, he keeps in touch with his friend better now than when he lived in Champaign! YouTube, blogs, news aggregators like Digg.com and Ebay all feasted on niche markets in the Internet, all aiding the propagation of information and helping people stay in touch with a fast-paced society.

The dark side of technology, though, is equally omnipresent. Children spend more time in front of the television, computer, and the PlayStation than out playing basketball that some say has led to record rates of child obesity. Moreover, even when enjoyed with friends, digital activities inhibit the development of social skills, creating more introverted engineers and fewer extroverted history and English majors. While we hardly need, want, or expect everyone to be a social butterfly, the numbers of woefully awkward people in all disciplines seems to increase every year.

The iPhone in particular is a paradoxical device. Apple has recently reaped record profits from a device which is generally only usable by one person at a time, the iPod, that has further contributed to solitary syndrome. Now, however, Apple mixed its profit reaper with a more social gadget. In a way, it is brilliant: a device that allows for personal enjoyment (the iPod) fused with interpersonal communication (the cell phone). Obviously the market for such a device exists and the iPhone will likely be a success in some respects, but creative inventions need not all work to decrease societal face-to-face time.

Clich‚d arguments regarding children aside, people are too digital. We have laptops, cell phones, iPods and PDA’s, for business and for leisure. Clearly modern industry and business rely on such digitalization, but the consequence of such advances are that people can never leave the office. Doctors traditionally have been on call during strange hours, but now we all are always on call, connected by wireless shackle to the desk.

Even as the increasingly global society works to liberate literal slaves from tyrannical oppressors, we digitally enslave our own upper-middle class. Ask many young professionals, though, and they are happy with their digital lives. They can leave work early to go to Cubs games and conduct their meeting later using a webcam. While flextime itself is a brilliant invention, the international market is becoming so competitive that it is only a matter of time before the benefits of technology fade into ceaseless work.

I refuse to sound like a hypocrite: I like my digital devices. Yet I, unlike most people, want to, and do, get away from them from time to time. When I cannot check my e-mail for a weekend or when my phone decides to stop working for a few days, my life is peaceful. Time slows down and I can relax. Beer tastes better and the sun shines.

The iPhone has the potential to be a seminal invention, one that reduces digital clutter without becoming socially cumbersome. Simultaneously we must view it with suspicion, else we might end up as digital slaves, living in an iWorld where always I work.