The Precious Rings and Cellphones

One of the Encore channels was showing the Lord of the Rings trilogy the other day. I've seen it many times before, but always enjoy repeat viewings. Tolkien's story is full of insights and lessons about human nature and society, and I usually pick up something new each time I watch it. This time was no exception.

The whole premise of Lord of the Rings is that, in the distant past on Middle Earth, different sets of rings were forged and presented as gifts of power to the leaders of the men, elves, and dwarfs. Unknown to them in their utter attachment to these rings, which they wore and treasured, was the fact that the dark lord Sauron had forged a separate ring that bound all who wore the others under his power and control. The result was the ascendency of Sauron to power and war against the peoples of Middle Earth.

I can't help thinking that, with today's increasingly compact and Internet-fast cellphones, something similar is going on. Like Tolkien's rings, their possessors tend to be almost fanatically attached to them; they really represent in some ways their "precious". And it does seem that these little gadgets provide their owners with a lot of power, don't they? But...

It seems that, with each new advent in information technology comes a corresponding decrease in personal privacy. For not only is it much easier to pick up signals from portable devices and hack personal information from them, but simply transacting any kind of business on them seems to be fed into various data banks that build up dossiers on the users. But there is something, in my opinion, even more foreboding than this...

My particular phone has a feature whereby all of the individual phone locations within my plan (with me there are four) can be pinpointed and revealed through GPS (presumably as long as the phone is "on"). This phone-locating service is supposedly a purely elective option available only to the subscriber, but my suspicious nature just can't keep me from wondering whether other parties have access to this information besides me. You can see, can't you, how much concentrated power could arise if some one party knew the exact whereabouts of everyone? Especially if the people didn't know this? Coupled with the increasing ability to launch precision remote-control military attacks, this could make that party almost invulnerable and all-powerful. Remind you yet of Sauron?

So please forgive me this near-paranoid rant. After all, this is America and something like that could never happen here, only in some made-up fantasy land like Middle Earth...or could it?