Amen. One other wish - that people be in the moment. If you're at a concert or a sporting event, listen to the concert or watch the damned game. The point isn't always to record what you're doing, it's to DO what you're doing. Trust me, you'll remember the moments even more deeply if you're paying attention and the truth is that you will rarely if ever look at those photos again.
Thank you. Am sharing widely. Pet peeves are the parents who think it's okay for their kids to watch videos or play games in restaurants and other public settings. Worse that the volume is up. I've spoken up (politely) many times, at restaurants, in aircraft, lobbies, and get dirty looks and even the occasional f-you. If they don't act, I have called on management, flight attendants, etc., who enforce. Interestingly, have had people around me thank me for speaking up. I have never heard anyone else speak up about it. So I feel alone in it.
Great post. 100% agree. My husband and I have a marriage exemption: we take great pleasure in reading at the table in restaurants as a form of parallel play. We read each other passages from books or articles, or pass memes back and forth. After 37 years -- and since we're together 24/7 -- we appreciate some fresh topics. It's exactly what our parents used to do at the breakfast table, reading the newspaper together.
But Miss Manners should be writing articles about how unacceptable it is to pester anyone, anywhere, with the noise of your devices. It's downright ill-bred and tacky.
Voluntarily deafening yourself with earbuds is equally anti-social. if I'm out walking, I only put in one earbud, because both will deprive me of too much situational awareness. I don't know how people can feel safe out on the streets not being able to hear the crazy guy coming up behind you, or the backup beep of an oncoming truck, or someone hollering that you dropped your scarf. The world of the street is interactive, and sound is a lot of that interaction. You cut off that channel at your own risk.
When we attended performances in China, the ushers wandered up and down the aisles during the show with laser pointers. Anyone with a lit screen in their hand would soon find the image disrupted by a pinpoint of red light. It was a silent but effective way to be shamed into putting the damn thing away.
I am fully in agreement with NO VOLUME IN PUBLIC. I've spent countless obnoxious bus, train, and plane rides with clueless (or intentionally irritating, often) fellow passengers who insist on making everyone listen to the tinny garbage coming out of their shitty phone speakers. Also in workplace break rooms. I cannot tell you how many coworkers I wanted to scream at to stfu when they watched whole ass TV shows on their phones at full volume. Usually paired by eating loudly and sloppily like a farm animal, but that's another topic, lol
Ah(wo)man. And bless my dad's boomer heart, if he watches on more video with full volume on his phone while blasting 24-hour "news" my brain might honestly explode. Quiet contemplation is so underrated these days. Give your brain some free time to wander. I promise, you won't miss anything by disconnecting [she types from her phone].
"And they are terrible, enabling us to retreat from real life like never before, and designed specifically to capture our attention without us even fully noticing." I caught myself a few nights ago watching a movie on TV while scrolling through my phone. I realized that I'd been doing that for awhile now, and now I put the phone on its charger in a separate room. I realized that it was zapping my ability to concentrate, and once a very avid book reader, I had stopped reading books and was obsessing on political articles on the internet. Yesterday I was able to read an entire book without my mind wandering, my nervousness increasing, and giving in to the urge to look at my phone.
I'm starting to hate what smartphones are doing to us. When I was a kid, I remember older people blaming TV for their kids' various misbehaviors and poor grades in school. We're no different; we may have more information, but we may actually be getting dumbed down because we aren't using our imaginations and our deductive reasoning skills so well anymore.
And I can't stand seeing people everywhere with their faces in their phones. How many concerts or movies have we attended where we can hear phones ringing and people talking on them? Going out to dinner, people stare at phones instead of talking to each other. And a law had to be passed prohibiting hands-on phone use while driving because people's addiction to their phones (including texting while driving, dear god) was killing other people.
I sometimes miss being incommunicado whenever I was away from phones. I maintain my privacy by turning my phone off or shutting off the ringtone and letting calls go to voicemail. My time shouldn't be so easily stolen by a hand held bit of plastic and glass.
No audio. Period. The rest is bizarre: people sitting together each looking at their own phones in class, at restaurants, in living rooms, at bars... Why do they bother to get together?
The worst is airports. The cacophony!
Do people really not realize that other people are not interested in, do not want to hear, and should not have to hear their phone conversations, their entertainment, their friends, their grandchildren, their politics, their sporting events, and everything else?
I'm with you. Phones do not belong in public places or while driving.
I worked at a B1G university for almost 20 years before retiring in 2021. Our building was (still is) located on a 4-lane street and had a traffic light at the entrance/exit of our lot. Across the street, at the same light was a very large parking lot used by commuters. When I walked along that street I kept a fairly random count of people in cars with cell phones at their ears: it averaged about half of them. When I had to wait at the light to make a left turn after work, the traffic coming from the opposite lot ran about the same -- people who just HAD to be on their phone ASAP after work.
The other side of that was the pedestrians who, by law, have the right-of-way in a crosswalk and there were people -- students by their apparent age -- who stared at their phone and never paused to see if the walkway was clear.
AMEN. It is so rude to text, take calls, or watch tictoc when you are with someone else. It is so rude to look at your phone in a theater. It is so rude to watch a video without headphones when you are on a plane. ETC. I'm not going to call out my friends who do this but it definitely affects our friendship.
It is helpful for me to remember this piece of information-- at this point, Netflix sees their biggest competitor not as another streaming service but as sleep. SLEEP!! And I think other content providers see things essentially the same way. They don't actually want us to have social connection, sleep a healthy length of time, be outdoors or in our community, because those things take us away from our phones and their content and represent lost income for them. I think it's important we recognize that.
I'm not throwing my phone in the trash (although maybe I'd be better off), but I really try to implement things that make it easier for me to do it less. Plug it in to recharge far away from me. Put it in another room. Put limits on certain apps. Even tracking the amount of time I spend so it's not unconscious. I think all these things help.
Your rules seem good to me, Jill, but I'm 77. I am not sure younger people's ears and attention still work the way mine do.Sometimes I think they feel impinged upon if I try to interrupt their screen activities with conversation -- or with silence. Also, I do remember being a child out with a group of adult relatives, going crazy with boredom when their conversation was the only thing on offer for entertainment.
Fellow medium-aged crank here, fully on board with all of this. If you can't take your kids to a restaurant without them looking at a screen, they have no business being there in the first place. God forbid they should actually have to interact with adults or experience a millisecond of boredom. (I am fully on board with reading a book or coloring at a restaurant). When people are walking too slow in the subway stations because they are looking at the phone I will say something (especially when they're walking up the MIDDLE of the staircase and blocking everyone from getting by). If a date pulled out a phone and did anything other than glance at it, I'd leave (barring your aforementioned emergency scenario).
I'll sometimes go to a bar and watch a soccer game on my phone. I always watch it with the sound all the way down or I bring headphones if I want to listen to it. I'm not trying to pat myself on the back or anything. I just thought this was obvious common courtesy.
My dad died in 2008 and didn’t have a smart phone, or even a cell phone. People thought he was crazy, including me. He was a department store manager and said that if people at his work could, they’d be calling him all the time rather than learning to figure out things for themselves.
I’ve got older kids, including a young adult now, and I finally kind of understand his point. Being available for emergencies can easily turn into being available for everything, including things they just need to figure out for themselves. The reality is, few things on my phone ever have an immediate urgency.
Amen. One other wish - that people be in the moment. If you're at a concert or a sporting event, listen to the concert or watch the damned game. The point isn't always to record what you're doing, it's to DO what you're doing. Trust me, you'll remember the moments even more deeply if you're paying attention and the truth is that you will rarely if ever look at those photos again.
Thank you. Am sharing widely. Pet peeves are the parents who think it's okay for their kids to watch videos or play games in restaurants and other public settings. Worse that the volume is up. I've spoken up (politely) many times, at restaurants, in aircraft, lobbies, and get dirty looks and even the occasional f-you. If they don't act, I have called on management, flight attendants, etc., who enforce. Interestingly, have had people around me thank me for speaking up. I have never heard anyone else speak up about it. So I feel alone in it.
My son and his friends used to have a policy that when they were at a restaurant, the first person to pull out his phone had to pick up the tab.
Great post. 100% agree. My husband and I have a marriage exemption: we take great pleasure in reading at the table in restaurants as a form of parallel play. We read each other passages from books or articles, or pass memes back and forth. After 37 years -- and since we're together 24/7 -- we appreciate some fresh topics. It's exactly what our parents used to do at the breakfast table, reading the newspaper together.
But Miss Manners should be writing articles about how unacceptable it is to pester anyone, anywhere, with the noise of your devices. It's downright ill-bred and tacky.
Voluntarily deafening yourself with earbuds is equally anti-social. if I'm out walking, I only put in one earbud, because both will deprive me of too much situational awareness. I don't know how people can feel safe out on the streets not being able to hear the crazy guy coming up behind you, or the backup beep of an oncoming truck, or someone hollering that you dropped your scarf. The world of the street is interactive, and sound is a lot of that interaction. You cut off that channel at your own risk.
When we attended performances in China, the ushers wandered up and down the aisles during the show with laser pointers. Anyone with a lit screen in their hand would soon find the image disrupted by a pinpoint of red light. It was a silent but effective way to be shamed into putting the damn thing away.
I am fully in agreement with NO VOLUME IN PUBLIC. I've spent countless obnoxious bus, train, and plane rides with clueless (or intentionally irritating, often) fellow passengers who insist on making everyone listen to the tinny garbage coming out of their shitty phone speakers. Also in workplace break rooms. I cannot tell you how many coworkers I wanted to scream at to stfu when they watched whole ass TV shows on their phones at full volume. Usually paired by eating loudly and sloppily like a farm animal, but that's another topic, lol
Ah(wo)man. And bless my dad's boomer heart, if he watches on more video with full volume on his phone while blasting 24-hour "news" my brain might honestly explode. Quiet contemplation is so underrated these days. Give your brain some free time to wander. I promise, you won't miss anything by disconnecting [she types from her phone].
"And they are terrible, enabling us to retreat from real life like never before, and designed specifically to capture our attention without us even fully noticing." I caught myself a few nights ago watching a movie on TV while scrolling through my phone. I realized that I'd been doing that for awhile now, and now I put the phone on its charger in a separate room. I realized that it was zapping my ability to concentrate, and once a very avid book reader, I had stopped reading books and was obsessing on political articles on the internet. Yesterday I was able to read an entire book without my mind wandering, my nervousness increasing, and giving in to the urge to look at my phone.
I'm starting to hate what smartphones are doing to us. When I was a kid, I remember older people blaming TV for their kids' various misbehaviors and poor grades in school. We're no different; we may have more information, but we may actually be getting dumbed down because we aren't using our imaginations and our deductive reasoning skills so well anymore.
And I can't stand seeing people everywhere with their faces in their phones. How many concerts or movies have we attended where we can hear phones ringing and people talking on them? Going out to dinner, people stare at phones instead of talking to each other. And a law had to be passed prohibiting hands-on phone use while driving because people's addiction to their phones (including texting while driving, dear god) was killing other people.
I sometimes miss being incommunicado whenever I was away from phones. I maintain my privacy by turning my phone off or shutting off the ringtone and letting calls go to voicemail. My time shouldn't be so easily stolen by a hand held bit of plastic and glass.
No audio. Period. The rest is bizarre: people sitting together each looking at their own phones in class, at restaurants, in living rooms, at bars... Why do they bother to get together?
The worst is airports. The cacophony!
Do people really not realize that other people are not interested in, do not want to hear, and should not have to hear their phone conversations, their entertainment, their friends, their grandchildren, their politics, their sporting events, and everything else?
I'm with you. Phones do not belong in public places or while driving.
I worked at a B1G university for almost 20 years before retiring in 2021. Our building was (still is) located on a 4-lane street and had a traffic light at the entrance/exit of our lot. Across the street, at the same light was a very large parking lot used by commuters. When I walked along that street I kept a fairly random count of people in cars with cell phones at their ears: it averaged about half of them. When I had to wait at the light to make a left turn after work, the traffic coming from the opposite lot ran about the same -- people who just HAD to be on their phone ASAP after work.
The other side of that was the pedestrians who, by law, have the right-of-way in a crosswalk and there were people -- students by their apparent age -- who stared at their phone and never paused to see if the walkway was clear.
AMEN. It is so rude to text, take calls, or watch tictoc when you are with someone else. It is so rude to look at your phone in a theater. It is so rude to watch a video without headphones when you are on a plane. ETC. I'm not going to call out my friends who do this but it definitely affects our friendship.
Agree 100%. Also please don’t hold your phone up in front of me to record the musician we’re watching together.
It is helpful for me to remember this piece of information-- at this point, Netflix sees their biggest competitor not as another streaming service but as sleep. SLEEP!! And I think other content providers see things essentially the same way. They don't actually want us to have social connection, sleep a healthy length of time, be outdoors or in our community, because those things take us away from our phones and their content and represent lost income for them. I think it's important we recognize that.
I'm not throwing my phone in the trash (although maybe I'd be better off), but I really try to implement things that make it easier for me to do it less. Plug it in to recharge far away from me. Put it in another room. Put limits on certain apps. Even tracking the amount of time I spend so it's not unconscious. I think all these things help.
Your rules seem good to me, Jill, but I'm 77. I am not sure younger people's ears and attention still work the way mine do.Sometimes I think they feel impinged upon if I try to interrupt their screen activities with conversation -- or with silence. Also, I do remember being a child out with a group of adult relatives, going crazy with boredom when their conversation was the only thing on offer for entertainment.
Fellow medium-aged crank here, fully on board with all of this. If you can't take your kids to a restaurant without them looking at a screen, they have no business being there in the first place. God forbid they should actually have to interact with adults or experience a millisecond of boredom. (I am fully on board with reading a book or coloring at a restaurant). When people are walking too slow in the subway stations because they are looking at the phone I will say something (especially when they're walking up the MIDDLE of the staircase and blocking everyone from getting by). If a date pulled out a phone and did anything other than glance at it, I'd leave (barring your aforementioned emergency scenario).
I'll sometimes go to a bar and watch a soccer game on my phone. I always watch it with the sound all the way down or I bring headphones if I want to listen to it. I'm not trying to pat myself on the back or anything. I just thought this was obvious common courtesy.
My dad died in 2008 and didn’t have a smart phone, or even a cell phone. People thought he was crazy, including me. He was a department store manager and said that if people at his work could, they’d be calling him all the time rather than learning to figure out things for themselves.
I’ve got older kids, including a young adult now, and I finally kind of understand his point. Being available for emergencies can easily turn into being available for everything, including things they just need to figure out for themselves. The reality is, few things on my phone ever have an immediate urgency.
And thanks for this Jill — reminders help!