a fun and maybe useful rant with some research cited. Barry Wellman _____________________________________________________________________
Barry Wellman S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology NetLab Director Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman for fun: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php _____________________________________________________________________ Are BlackBerry users the new smokers? USA Today, via Yahoo News Posted 12/11/2006 7:24 PM ET By Patricia Pearson I have a new policy with my friends. I will not meet them in a restaurant or bar holiday cheer notwithstanding unless they promise to switch off their cellphones and BlackBerrys. It's embarrassing to impose such sanctions. It seems discourteous. Yet I feel like I have to speak up. The idea of a ban came to me after dining with an old college friend. I was confiding something, when it dawned on me that he wasn't even listening. He was staring down at his lap, instead. "What are you doing?" I asked, feeling dismayed. "I'm sending you an e-mail," he muttered. "You're sending me an e-mail?" "Yeah, 'cause you said you wanted Frank's phone number." He raised his hand to reveal his BlackBerry. See? Before I could choke out an astonished reply, his Nokia began chirping. "Gotta take this," he said with an apologetic shrug. He proceeded to spend 10 minutes on the phone with his wife. I sat, as I invariably do, whether I'm on the subway, in airplanes or at coffee shops, having to listen to someone else's overly loud monologue about God knows what, feeling distinctly unimportant and irrelevant. What does the cellphone caller care whether I overhear him describing the great sex he had this weekend or how his baby finally had a "huge dump" after 10 days? Hardly thoughtful The most disingenuous ads by far during the holiday season are those that connect cellphones to fuzzy notions of "thoughtfulness" and goodwill to all men. Sure. In fact, cellphone usage goes well beyond our already abandoned habit of saying "good morning," and enters a kind of outer space of rudeness. What is the behavioral equivalent of this socially sanctioned and business-approved use of gadgetry? It's like having a dinner party guest pull out her crime thriller to read while she slurps up your pasta. It's like a man striding 10 feet ahead of his lady companion when they're out for a stroll, or someone firing up a cigarette in an elevator. As a matter of fact, the smoking analogy is most apt because 20 years ago, a person would have been able to light up in an elevator. Smoking was socially acceptable in all manner of venues until non-smokers got the nerve to push back. As with mobile technology, what made smoking so obnoxious was that it was addictive and compulsive, blinding smokers to their impact on non-smokers. Addiction makes us selfish. We don't want to confront that unpleasant truth, so it takes a lot of push-back to admit that we're being offensive. I know this as a smoker who has quit and then fallen off the wagon roughly a billion times. If smoking hadn't been banned in indoor public spaces in my city of Toronto, I would have lit up right alongside Sean Penn at his International Film Festival news conference this fall. As a non-user of gadgets, I now find myself on the other side of the fence. And my parallel with addiction isn't only a metaphor. A study by researchers at Rutgers University-Camden, in partnership with the University of Northampton in England, has found that a third of BlackBerry users show signs of addiction "similar to alcoholics." A study released this summer by the University of Queensland in Australia likewise found a pattern of cellphone addiction that was likened to smoking. People could not stop answering or calling, panicked if they didn't have their phone, described going without their cellphones as "like one of my limbs is missing," and got into car accidents while text messaging. Meanwhile, psychologist Glenn Wilson at King's College London reported last year that although nine out of 10 of the workers he studied admitted that answering messages in the middle of meetings was blatantly impolite, a third of them argued that their behavior was "acceptable and seen as a sign of diligence and efficiency." Awareness If corporate pressure is behind this compulsive and antisocial display of bad manners, then corporations need to be wary. Gayle Porter, one of the Rutgers authors of the study of BlackBerry use, likened the current research on technology addiction to the groundwork laid in the 1950s that led to the major lawsuits against tobacco companies. Such lawsuits might be thrown out of court (How do you prove an addiction without physical symptoms?). But the social push-back has no such stringent requirements and might well be on the way. There is or ought to be a limit to what we can tolerate as a civil society in which the most rudimentary grace involves humans acknowledging the presence of other humans in their midst. I mean, good Lord, like enablers, we have really, collectively, allowed this disruptive rudeness to get out of hand. Patricia Pearson is a freelance writer and author living in Toronto. She is also a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors. Find this article at: http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-12-11-opcom_x.htm?csp=N009 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mobile-society" group. 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