Tom Maurstad

It's the nature of both pop culture and people that we reveal ourselves and offer insights into our ever-changing media environment in the small, incidental choices we make as consumers and users of technology.

When it comes to cool, cutting-edge products of future-is-now technology, the iPhone is at or near the top of the list. As a recent entrant into the iPhone club, I set about engaging in a common ritual: pimping my phone. Among the myriad choices – to sheathe or not to sheathe, wallpaper, on and on – none is more iconically important than selecting a ringtone. Scrolling through the phone's catalog of sounds – barking dog, roaring motorcycle – I was caught by the heading "old phone." Sure enough, out came the metallic clattering bell of an old phone, the sort of sound you expect to come out of an avocado-green, rotary-dial phone mounted on the kitchen wall. Not the sort of sound you expect to come out of a sleek, brushed-metal mobile communications computer.

"Perfect," I thought, congratulating myself on the sardonic whimsy embedded in my ringtone choice, certain to announce me to those around when my phone (literally) rang as someone sophisticated enough to wink at the past even as I embraced the future.

As I quickly discovered, however, all it marked me as was another sheep in the iPhone herd who picked "old phone" as his ringer.

Standing in line at Central Market, I heard that old phone ring and thought for a moment it was my phone. It wasn't. It was the woman's standing behind me. Her name was Meredith Tyler; she's 37. She explained that her ringtone choice was based on pure and simple practicality.

"I like it because it sounds like what it is: a ringing phone. I don't have to think, it doesn't take a second to go, 'Oh yeah, that's my phone.' You know, it's what I grew up with."

For all the potential as entertainment or image enhancement, practicality still rules for many people when it comes to choosing a ringtone.

"We hear that from people all the time – 'Can't we just have a normal ring?' " says Ted Suh, chief marketing officer for Zed USA, a mobile-content company offering all sorts of ringtones, wallpaper and other personalizing audiovisual accessories for your cellphone. "There's a certain market that wants a ringtone that gets their attention and sounds like a phone."

In a same-only-different way, the young man whose phone rang with that old-phone ring in front of the Magnolia Theatre had a simple but not so much practical reason for choosing it. "It just struck me as funny," said Jesse Landis, 22. "That old retro ring, it's just cool."

"Members of what I call 'the bubble generation' – young consumers who have grown up after the dot-com bubble burst – are always mixing and matching things in unexpected, quirky ways," says Tom Hayes, author of Jump Point: How Network Culture Is Revolutionizing Business. "They are so accustomed to abundance – of information, of entertainment, of media, of technology. So they are always mashing up old and new."

This notion of mashing up – the term originally was applied to musicians and computer geeks who would "mash up" two or more old songs to synthesize a new one – turns out to be both an important trend and a signifying cultural behavior.

"A ringtone is iconic, and in this era of choice, you can think of it as the aural evocation of an idea," says Steve Diller, head of the experience design studio for California-based Cheskin Added Value, an innovation consulting firm.

"For this generation of consumers who have access to pretty much everything," he says, "the looting of icons, the mixing and matching, is their way of expressing originality.

"It's the novelty and contrast of what they mash up. Quirkiness is the goal – not so much meaningful or significant, just odd. It's how you express yourself when there's so much to choose from. Juxtaposition is the new creativity."

The result is a culture where futurism and nostalgia are bundled together, where an ironic wink at the past is mixed in with a wistful longing to return to it, or at least stay in touch with it. And where the latest mobile communications computers ring like Grandma's old kitchen phone.