It seems to have become an acceptable practice for some people to disappear every time they get a new text message. We’re sharing the same physical space with the intent of connecting personally, but we aren’t. And if we are, it’s fragmented, like those project team meetings you go to where everyone is on their laptop doing something else while the moderator drones on and a fraction of the group participates.
It’s another symptom of how short our attention spans have become and how much we crave new information.
Last week I was at a dinner party. Out of the six people there, I was the only one who wasn’t texting or checking Facebook on my phone. Nobody was enjoying that great dinner with friends. They were all somewhere else–Zeke Camusio in Is Our World Completely Insane?
More and more this seems culturally acceptable, like the next course of a meal or the thing we do when, heaven forbid, we’ve temporarily run out of things to talk about. It’s great to see prominent online community members pushing against this. Chris Brogan doesn’t hold anything back in I’m Not Really Here,
If you’re looking at your phone and not me, you’re saying, “You’re not as important as these people who aren’t here with us right now.” If you’re checking your phone while we’re talking, you’re saying, “I really don’t care what you’re talking about.” If you’re into your phone and can’t seem to put it down, you’re telling me, “I can’t really focus, so what do you really expect from me if we work together?”
It’s not okay. Even though society seems to turn away politely while you do it. Even though we’re all digital junkies. Even though there are a hundred little exceptions.
To be fair, I don’t have a smart phone so maybe I don’t understand how hard this is. In fact I barely have a cell phone in the form of a T-Mobile prepaid “plan,” which, by the way, is a great deal for my current situation of working from home. If it rings I know it’s important because hardly anyone calls it. For about $50 a year I have all the minutes I need which is about $900 a year cheaper than a contract plan.
So I’m curious, for those of you out there that feel the same way, what ways have you asked people in your presence to remain so?
And to ask a different question–beyond the obvious “my spouse is calling” or “my wife might be going into labor”–when and why do you think it is okay to interrupt an in-person conversation because you just got a new message?
Image by Ed Yourdon via flickr used under a Creative Commons license.
December 9, 2010 at 12:12 pm
Have you tried sitting around with a group of kids (age range, say, 5 to 20) for an extended period?
they’re always using their cellphones (I noticed the kids I know used to have their DSes out all the time; increasingly, they don’t…they play games on iPhones, but they’ve also replaced playing games on the DS as a group with watching videos on the phones, Facebooking and so on. It’s interesting as it indicates the actual game playing wasn’t the main point, it was the experience of playing the games as group). They do it inclusively, though. They’ll all read their Facebooks, and compare the latest stupid cat videos. They’ll talk about friends they all have on Facebook but who aren’t there. They’ll watch videos together (kids seem to love doing this) – either on one phone, or all watching the same video on their own phones.
It’s more a case of the phones being used to extend the social interaction to include people who aren’t present and events and experiences that aren’t part of the current physical environment. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that.
Really, I don’t think there’s anything particularly intrinsically wrong with all the things you complain about in this post. The convention that when you’re in a particular physical place with particular physical people you must devote all your attention to those people is just a convention. It’s not a universal moral law, nor is it something we apply particularly consistently. If you go to a football game with friends you’re not expected to pay constant attention to your friends. A lot of people would apply different rules to travelling on a train or plane with friends as compared to going to dinner with them. There isn’t some universal law of interactions that we must all observe or our identity will be in peril, or something.
Why would it be so terrible if we took more of an attitude of being to some degree ‘present’ in the networks we choose to pay attention to even when we’re not physically present in those networks? I’m not sure there’s any iron rule that someone who is in the same room as me should always take precedence over someone who’s contacting me via email or IRC or a phone call. Why should physical proximity be a trump card?
I think you can consciously choose to conduct your relationships on that basis but it’s just that; it’s a choice. It’s not necessarily the choose everyone will make, and it’s not inherently superior to other choices. As long as your choice is appropriately communicated to others, it should be respected, and they can choose whether or not they want to interact with you on those terms. Of course, humans don’t tend to negotiate these things explicitly – “While we’re having lunch I may answer calls from social networks X, Y and Z but probably not from A, B, or C” – we do it more subtly. But we do negotiate parameters like this all the time, in lots of different ways.
I think this is something that’s developing very rapidly as technology improves and becomes more widely adopted. I only see us being more connected, more of the time, in future, and it’ll become common to have a more nuanced approach to presence and interactions. Broadly-observed conventions for various situations will also likely emerge, just as they already have done for older issues, like landline phone calls during social situations and so on.