I still remember the feeling of surprise and dismay on the first occasion that a friend began scrolling through her smartphone while we were in the middle of a conversation.
It was about eight years ago, and we were at the beach. As I recall, we were standing facing one another on the dry sand, a short distance from the shallow surf where our children were frisking. I don’t remember the topic, but it was my turn to speak and I was gaily chatting away when my companion pulled a BlackBerry out of the pocket of her shorts and began studying it.
I was nonplussed. It felt as though I had vanished right in the middle of a sentence. Was I supposed to keep talking? Was she signaling sudden hostility, or boredom?
At a loss, I sputtered out and, to cover my embarrassment, turned my face into the salty wind.
“Keep going,” I heard her say, “I’m listening.”
I glanced at her. She was still looking at her phone.
Though I didn’t know it at the time, that incident marked my personal introduction to the future. My friend belongs to that category of tech users known as “early adopters” (whereas I’m probably a member of the “late majority” if not a primitive “laggard”). In the eight years since I was treated with, as it seemed to me then, astonishing discourtesy, broad swathes of the culture have caught up with my fashionable friend.
It is now commonplace for people not only to check their phones discreetly, under the table at, say, a restaurant dinner, but also to do so openly as conversation surges around them. At children’s sports events and recitals, you can see parents snapping photos on their phones and then subsiding into checking emails and texting. At large black-tie events, half the heads in the room will at one point or another be turned downward, towards a private glowing screen, no matter what else is happening. I utterly disapprove of all these actions — and, lo these eight years later, I feel sure I have committed every one of them.
Another friend of mine, a definite laggard, was recently giving a speech as part of a panel and was shocked and outraged to realize that her fellow panelists were scrolling on their phones during her talk and in full view of the audience! Many people in the audience, too, were looking down as much or more as they were looking up at her.
What are we to make of it all? Is this how we live now? Should we accept it? Or should we fight the siren call of the screen?
It’s a nice idea, to imagine returning to a time when people tended to be both physically and mentally present in their actual environment, but it is hard to see how it can be achieved without, say, an electromagnetic pulse sent by a hostile power knocking out electronic communications across the North American continent — and that doesn’t seem very appealing.
My speech-giving friend decided she wasn’t going to let it go and sent the following note to the other panelists: “I found your thumbing through your phones, while facing our audience, as I was speaking, both incredibly rude to me and disrespectful to the entire gathering.”
Only one man wrote back. “You were so interesting,” he told her, “that I was taking notes.” Hmm. I wonder.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
