Cellphone manners (7th July'09)

[A recent post on an HT Blog on travel touched upon how being connected may enable busy people to holiday more. I share here my abridged comments]

While it’s true that new technology is good if it actually ‘frees’ you, is that mostly the case? Some personal experiences may be diametrically opposite. You schedule a holiday to ‘get away from it all’. And then all your companions seem to be doing is going around like zombies with the cellphone glued to their ears!

The new tech. may enable some people to holiday so much more now than 20 years back, but does holidaying just mean physically going around places  and sites? Isn’t it an added (the main?) benefit that people otherwise too busy to connect with one another in daily life, except on a perfunctory basis, should be able to get adequate face time to ‘really’ connect? And how do you get that face time if the face itself is partly obscured by a cellphone almost all the time!

It's no wonder that some people are truly sick and tired of the cellphone, which is perhaps the most ubiquitous manifestation of new tech. More to the point, they are tired of the blatant misuse of the cellphone, if it can be put that way. People seem to be hiding behind new tech. in general (email?) and the cellphone in particular, seemingly to avoid any personal contact.

In days of yore, most people would be offended if you so much as looked away while talking to them, much less start talking to a third person. But these days nobody seems to notice how the cellphone is accorded the pride of place and the highest priority of response even while talking to someone face to face. You may leave the other person looking forlorn but, hey, what the heck, it’s the cellphone after all. And it HAS to be answered come what may!

The bottomline is: how much respect does someone accord to you. Enought to give you his/her undivided attention for at least a few minutes? If not, s/he perhaps deserves the same response and the same level of respect.

This holds true even for those who are no technophobes, those using computers at work since years, present on FB, Twitter, G-talk, Messenger, Orkut, blogging regularly, having own websites, and having tried out IE 8, Opera & Chrome (does that qualify?!). But still the lack of cellphone manners, and the lack of respect for the other that it portrays, may leave them frothing in the mouth.