{"id":30756,"date":"2022-08-24T01:02:00","date_gmt":"2022-08-24T01:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=30756"},"modified":"2022-08-25T05:06:43","modified_gmt":"2022-08-25T05:06:43","slug":"cell-towers-have-come-to-symbolize-our-deep-collective-anxieties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/cell-towers-have-come-to-symbolize-our-deep-collective-anxieties\/","title":{"rendered":"Cell towers have come to symbolize our deep collective anxieties"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Steven Jones<\/a>, University of South Florida<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new movie \u201cFall<\/a>\u201d is a survival-thriller about two young women, Becky and Hunter, who are avid rock climbers. To mark the one-year anniversary of Becky\u2019s husband\u2019s death in a climbing accident, they decide to climb an abandoned 2,000-foot TV tower.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But a ladder breaks, and they find themselves stranded atop the rusty steel latticework. Ironically, at the top of the communication tower, the climbers are too high in the air to get a phone signal to call for rescue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other recent movies have also featured terrifying communication towers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take the 2016 film \u201cCell<\/a>,\u201d which is based on a Stephen King novel. In it, a cell tower signal turns normal people into zombies, a literal version of the clich\u00e9<\/a> about the effect mobile phones have on users. The 2018 Indian sci-fi blockbuster \u201c2.0<\/a>\u201d features a gigantic Kaiju monster \u2013 akin to Godzilla or Mothra \u2013 made of cellphones. It rises to avenge the deaths of millions of birds supposedly killed by cell tower radiation. (Millions of birds do die<\/a> every year by crashing into towers, but probably because they become disoriented by their lights, not from the radiation they emit.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why are communication towers so scary? Why, in \u201cFall,\u201d is the steel tower somehow more disturbing than the rocky cliff face where Becky\u2019s husband died?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think it\u2019s about more than fear of heights. As a scholar who studies attitudes toward technology<\/a> \u2013 and who wrote a book on the Luddites<\/a> and another one on cell towers<\/a> \u2013 I see cell towers, like the radio and TV towers that preceded them, as the focus of deep collective anxieties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Channeling invisible forces<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As anthropologist Shannon Mattern has argued<\/a>, towers and antennas are visible manifestations of vast invisible networks \u2013 mostly wireless or underground \u2013 that can be hard for people to wrap their heads around, even as they grow increasingly dependent on them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They\u2019re a reminder of something that most of us would rather forget: that we\u2019re immersed in an electromagnetic soup of radio waves, walking around every day in what design scholar Anthony Dunne has called<\/a> \u201chertzian space.\u201d Those same invisible waves also signal the possibility of ubiquitous surveillance and manipulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
A cross tower doubles as a telecommunications node at Green Hills Baptist Church in La Habra, Calif. Gina Ferazzi\/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

So a latticework steel tower or a sleek monopole mast<\/a> with an array of rectangular antenna panels clustered at its top can elicit powerful responses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the one hand, there\u2019s denial \u2013 you might half-consciously \u201cunsee\u201d them and pretend they\u2019re not there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other hand, they can become a source of paranoia, which sometimes metastasizes into conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hidden in plain sight<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Cell towers are often designed to hide in plain sight. Some are even disguised as pine trees or palm trees<\/a> \u2013 rather poorly, in most cases. But stealth towers like these aren\u2019t actually meant to pass for the natural objects they imitate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Cell<\/a>
Cell tower \u2018camouflage\u2019 is meant to elicit benign disregard. George Rose\/Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Like all camouflage, they\u2019re just supposed to distract our attention long enough for us to overlook them. The brown painted \u201cbark\u201d and green plastic \u201cleaves,\u201d or the rows of rectangular antenna panels painted to blend into building fa\u00e7ades, are simply prompts to our unseeing \u2013 cues to look away. Nothing to see here, they say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, the towers quietly multiply<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In recent years, 5G antennas have started showing up everywhere, often as unlabeled boxes or cylinders on standalone poles or streetlights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Known as small-cell networks, these faster and more powerful 5G systems require many more antennas spaced closer together. This greater density has provoked increased fears<\/a> about potential risks to health and security, along with more paranoid reactions linking cellular radiation to cancer \u2013 a link not supported by scientific research<\/a>. Some people even wrongly blamed 5G for the COVID-19 pandemic<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a result of such conspiracy theories, 2020 saw a rash of cell tower arson<\/a> reminiscent of the Luddites \u2013 textile workers in 19th-century England who sabotaged new mechanical looms that were putting them out of work<\/a>. Two hundred years later, the name Luddite has become synonymous with any reaction against new technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Caution
The base of a 5G phone mast damaged by arsonists in May 2020 in Liverpool, England. Christopher Furlong\/Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Some of the extreme reactions against cell towers may be the result of displaced anxiety about the very real risks of everyday technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of us sense \u2013 though we often prefer to forget \u2013 that each steel cell tower or sleek 5G box is just the tip of the iceberg. It\u2019s a visible sign of mostly invisible global communication networks, tied to centers of commercial and political power, that are gradually eroding our privacy and autonomy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No wonder they\u2019re so terrifying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steven Jones<\/a>, Professor of English and Digital Humanities (Ret.), University of South Florida<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steven Jones, University of South Florida The new movie \u201cFall\u201d is a survival-thriller about two young women, Becky and Hunter, who are avid rock climbers. To mark the one-year anniversary of Becky\u2019s husband\u2019s death in a climbing accident, they decide to climb an abandoned 2,000-foot TV tower. But a ladder breaks, and they find themselves […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":30757,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293,8025],"tags":[9044,190,5491,147,366,3771,2021,12378,2225,3154,5700,3394],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30756"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30756"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30756\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30765,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30756\/revisions\/30765"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}