Three days before my 21st birthday, my mom sent me an e-mail suggesting a new iPhone application, Blood Alcohol Level. Users enter successive drinks into a calculator that plots one’s relative intoxication on a green line graph. After one crosses the white vertical line that marks sobriety’s end, the application offers two options: urbanites may call a cab, while suburbanites are faced with the Google results for “local DUI lawyers.”

While plotting to hijack DJing duties at parties with the combined forces of YouTube and my iPod, I found the application always hovering below my fingertips. In bars, I received text messages or phone calls only to look down and rediscover Blood Alcohol Level. Once at Eli Cannon’s, I recorded my alcohol consumption (four beers from two pitchers over a two-hour period). According to my iPhone, I was drunk.

As I finished each beer, my anxiety rose with the green line. Calling a cab wasn’t necessary. My friend would drive us home in a somewhat questionable state; then again, what of the DUI lawyer? Would the 3G network save us from lawsuits, hospital bills, and spiked insurance rates? Planning has never been my strong suit and, for the past two years, my iPhone has allowed me to avoid many everyday activities. I stopped getting out of bed to check my e-mail or the weather. Why do much of anything when my Google application can perform a voice activated search?

Around the third beer, I mentioned my Blood Alcohol Level application. Having met my mother, my friends knowingly laughed at her high-tech suggestion. Several minutes later, one of them received a call from home and, almost immediately afterwards, the other got a text message from her mother. Most Americans, or at least our parents, do not spend Thursday nights guzzling beer and eating mediocre, diarrhea-inducing quesadillas. During the time it took for verbal and textual responses to be made, I Googled “blood alcohol level” on my iPhone.

The iPhone soon became the locus of our conversation. My friends seemed to envy its convenience: whenever we went to oyster bars, museums, or grocery stores, GPS prevented us from getting lost. American highways were no longer purgatorial pathways. Rather, they took us to our desired location while the iPhone provided entertainment. We could listen to music, choose other activities nearby, track the financial market, read about Michele Obama’s dresses on NYTimes.com, reply to e-mails from our academic advisors, calculate tips, integrate our calendars, check our bank accounts, and listen to Hebrew blessings. And all of these activities could, of course, be recorded using both Voice Memo and a camera.

Prior to AT&T giving 3G to its entire cellular network, most people could only text and call. When someone didn’t immediately respond to one of my double texts (some texts are too long to be read as one text on a non-smart phone and therefore are divided in two), I spun into a fury. Unfortunately, many areas lack strong 3G support. In Hi Rise, calls home were often cut off. I found myself going downstairs or outside only to realize that as I confessed both secrets and passions, passersby overheard everything. How and why were 200 million people, roughly 7% of the world’s cell phone users, placed in similar traps on a daily basis?

International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 (IMT-2000 or, better yet, 3G) signifies an expanded set of guidelines for mobile telecommunication networks. By improving its bandwidth rate, 3G networks administer a wider range of services at a faster speed than other cellular bandwidth networks. The Japanese cellular service provider NTT DoCoMo launched 3G’s commercial career in 2001. Since October 2003, Verizon Wireless has overseen the first continuously expanding American 3G network. Cingular—now my service provider AT&T—enters this narrative because it developed 2.75G from 2.5G. Though the battle between Apple and AT&T continues to rage, iPhone users represent only a small percentage of 3G users. A contested and unexpected history emerges: my iPhone, the node of my social and working worlds, occupied a minor position in the world of 3G.

At 11 PM on Saturday September 19, 2009, my iPhone’s screen went black. Despite multiple attempts to recharge it, my iPhone was dead. In the middle of Connecticut, without a car but required to go to the Apple store, I existed sans iPhone for over a week.

The resulting absence was akin to a dead baby crawling towards me from above, gurgling and crying as if to remind me that there was some application that I couldn’t use, some piece of information that I’d have to receive in a less immediate manner. Worse yet, I could not listen to music. Without Miley Cyrus or Nina Simone, I was forced to interact with my peers rather than look down at my phone.

The day before my planned visit to the Westfarm mall’s Apple store (one of three Connecticut locations), my iPhone came back to life. Convinced my battery was dying, I retained my appointment. After waiting for thirty minutes among equally distraught iPhone users, camaraderie was forged between divergent interest groups. Indeed, a mother of three children told me about children’s computer games after I asked the Apple concierge about the Sims 3.

A part-time caterer, this mother had her old Blackberry in hand and, after her iPhone’s third crash, was prepared to demand a new iPhone or forgo her contract. On a Mac desktop, she showed me several games with simple interfaces. Math Evolved: Math Action Game featured animal-human hybrids that ran around mazes collecting numbers. She explained the game was didactic because players learned remedial addition through pre-algebra, nearly quoting the Apple website’s description (“A pre-algebra game for the Halo generation”). Her candor led to another startling admittance: her children each had a desktop and played games at least an hour a day.

Once at the store’s Genius Bar, I was politely reminded of how to restart the iPhone.

“Do you ever turn your phone off?”

The Geniuses speak like prophets, murmuring truths under the store’s glaring lights and pulsing music.

“No.”

“Well, you should think of your iPhone like a mini-computer. You need to frequently turn it off so that it can rest.”

“Oh.”

My monosyllabic responses came from a combination of disappointment and anger. During my week off, I began to envy people with “normal” phones. How removed they seemed from the ensnaring mouth of telecommunications! I tried to get out of my service plan, but, unfortunately, I renewed a two-year contract this past July.

For two hours every day, I turn my rejuvenated iPhone off. I read, clean, run, and cook without direct access to the Internet, three to five text conversations, or e-mail. In this perceptual clarity, windows have reemerged as significant spaces. Just as I relied on the artificial light of my iPhone to tell me the weather, I started to look outside instead. Natural light bore a timelessness that no Wikipedia entry on Donna J. Haraway or Transformers could.

I allowed my iPhone to transform from a phone into a living being. During late afternoon naps, I slept next to it in case anyone tried to call me. At night, the phone rested on my bedside table next to unopened New Yorkers, a subscription I renewed using my Safari application. Rather than controlling technology, I found myself lorded over not only by a plastic, glass, and metal pocket-sized computer, but also by a service contract, constant hardware updates, and Steve Jobs’ news media omnipresence.

I no longer have Blood Alcohol Level. In fact, it has been replaced by three new programs on the iTunes App store, Breathalyzer, iWasted, and Drink Timer, none of which I plan to download. When I drink, I try not to think about my phone. These days, the stars overhead yield enough information.