Peridot: I don't know anything without my screens.
While cell phones can be useless, at times they can be more handy than we are. Because of them, we have access to every word in the dictionary, can communicate while not being in the same area as your friends, can find out about local and long-distance news as soon as it happens, watch porn in a public area, can shoot lasers out of satellites from space... and also watch every cat video available on YouTube.
Because of this, sometimes the cell phones are more useful than us, almost to the point of not even needing us to function. In that case, some would be completely helpless without our cell-phones or our tablets or our fancy-pants PCs and Macintoshes. They can't spell correctly, they can't adapt to their surrounding environment, they can't eat anything without submitting pictures of their food onto Twitter and Facebook. They probably wouldn't even know how to turn a page after using Kindle for so long. There is a reason why "Nomophobia" (fear of being without a mobile phone) is considered an official term in the psychological community these days. Safe to say, modern conveniences can be considered a necessity for most these days.
A staple of every Phoneaholic Teenager.
Examples:
- Otonashi Meru from Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei. When deprived of her ability to flame people via email, she breaks down and starts babbling in Black Speech. She carries backup cellphones to avoid this.
- In The Mitchells vs. the Machines, Pal makes her point that humanity needs her more than she needs them when she shuts down the global WiFi. What follows is a serious of jump cuts showing that humanity devolves into anarchy over the lack of service, either treating WiFi as a god that needs sacrifices or stepping over each other to let the robots capture them for the promise of it.
- CSI-verse: Common with the younger crowd.
- CSI: When a group of teenagers have their phones confiscated but are promised they'll get them back in a few hours, one of the girls asks, "What am I supposed to do without my phone?!"
- CSI: NY: When a high-school girl is asked to turn in her phone as evidence, she's not worried because...
Girl: Here, take it. I have another one at home.
Stella: Of course you do.
- Tom Haverford from Parks and Recreation would rather go to jail than spend a week without his cell phone or other electronics. When a judge doles out exactly that punishment to him after live-tweeting while driving, he resorts to improvising the online experience, including making a simulation of Pinterest with a bulletin board… and "clicking" the pictures on it.
- The NCIS episode "Power Down" takes place during a Big Blackout that renders almost all the team's fancy gadgets useless. Gibbs (the least tech-savvy person at NCIS) is the only agent who has little problem carrying out the ep's murder investigation with low-tech tools.
- Mitch Benn:
- "Baby I Love You (But Not Like I Love My Phone)":
And though I spend every day thinking about you,
I'm reasonably sure I could get by without you,
'Cos, baby, I love you, but not like I love my phone. - "The South Downs Cowboy", which is basically a List Song of places in the South Downs, concludes:
And somewhere there's a songwriter, sitting all alone,
And he's glad he's got the internet on his mobile phone,
And he's grateful he has access to information, 'cos,
This morning he wasn't sure where the South Downs even was.
- "Baby I Love You (But Not Like I Love My Phone)":
- When a literal bug knocks-out the Wi-Fi in Sin Inc's I.T. Department in Hell Pie, it doesn't take long for it to devolve into anarchy. Employees start turning on one another, the halls are full of booby-traps MacGyvered out of office supplies and one section even turns into a "real life creepy pasta."
- xkcd: Extended Mind
: "When Wikipedia has a server outage, my apparent IQ drops by about 30 points."
- In the Smosh video "OUR GENERATION IS F*CKED: The Movie," Anthony is used as a test subject to see if today's generation could get by in a world without cell-phones and internet where he quickly breaks down, slowly going crazy without modern conveniences. Safe to say, our generation is f*cked.
- In the 28th episode of the All Def Digital YouTube series Dr. Reasons, the Dr. is treating a couple where the man literally does everything with texting. He never talks like a normal person, only sending texts (how he knows other people's numbers is never shown), and when Dr. Reasons solves the issue by destroying his cell phone, he throws a fit and frightens them away only to pull another cell phone out of his pocket.
- In the twelthofadime video "Lord of the Facebooks," Kyle, Ben, Baxter and Charlie end up stranded on a deserted island which they later find out is not deserted. Baxter brings up that they would not be able to go on Facebook, Myspace and Twitter in their situation. Ben points out that food and shelter take higher priority, but because he is the Butt-Monkey, they all just tell him to shut up. While Kyle tries and fails to hunt, Baxter and Charlie instead try to replicate the experience of Facebook, Twitter and television.
- Peridot from Steven Universe is a Justified example: she is from another planet and really doesn't know much about the Earth, save for the information that her now-destroyed tech could provide.
