Pet Peeve of the day

By Stephanie Lindsey
Contributing Writer

Facebook pushed a story from the NY Times across my news feed called “Ahem!  Are you Talking to Me? (Or Texting?)”. If you are not familiar with this “in the digital age, it’s become fashionable to be rude” movement, you should get up to speed. The current idea appears to be that in order to become more polite, you should not use your phone. You should engage in purely face to face human interactions, and to be caught anywhere texting (or god forbid, Facebooking!), you are rude and really missing out on the world and everything going on around you.

The Digital Immigrants (that is what they would be called right?) are blaming our phones, computers, tablets, etc. for making us more rude. What people need to recognize is that technology is not evil. It is an enabler. Someone sitting across from you texting her coworker across town would be talking to her coworker if she were there. In the end of both situations, she would be ignoring your annoying babble.  Why are we not focused on the fact that she is totally blowing you off and being rude in general and only on the fact that she is using a new tool to do it? I feel like this is a very simple concept that seems to be completely missed by a lot of Digital Immigrants. I do not see any complaining about it on Facebook outside of this Immigrant dominated news source that provides me with great conversation topics for my all of my interactions, purist and electronic.

I honestly do not feel that an electronic human interaction is any less real or important than one done in person. If you are a good and kind citizen of the Digital Age, you know when to put your phone down and go visit your coworker who got dumped by the accountant for that girl in his math class he has been “working long nights” with. Yes, there are draw backs such as the missed body language but I do not think this is a reason to burn technology at the stake. Plus the most popular banner I see at these riots is the “rude” one. If your special someone is blowing you off for their phone, you need to have a sit down with them and talk about how it is rude to ignore you. Not that it is rude to text while you talk to them.

This is cultural lag that we are experiencing, not the end of the world. A similar rejection of technology occurred with Myspace and parents worrying about their children having a presence on the internet. But today, I see very little to nothing regarding the “your child is talking to pedophiles” movement. What happened? Public education did. Parents and teachers, together, started talking to kids and warning of the dangers of going online.

So what do we need now? More education. People need to get it together and understand that respect and attention is not demonstrated purely by physical presence or occasional eye contact. Both sides need to understand this. Digital Natives: do something other than throw yourself into your device if you are bored with that person talking at you. Digital Immigrants: understand that just because I have put my phone away does not mean I am paying attention to you more now than when you snarled at me about it. I am humoring you and your need to be right, Ill txt bout u l8r.

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