What’s the worst cell phone offense against etiquette you’ve committed? Or witnessed?
At an expensive bat mitzvah dinner earlier this year, I saw throngs of young teenagers phoning, texting and boisterously snapping cell phone pictures of each other in their suits and party frocks while, at the surrounding tables, adults sat in reserved, faintly embarrassed elegance.
The children’s behavior struck me as pretty boorish. They seemed oblivious both to their surroundings, and to any larger expectations that good manners might have demanded of them.
Yet at the same time, the event was supposed to be as pleasing for them as it was for the grown-ups. Given that cell phones have become ubiquitous in youth culture, it probably would have felt odd and alien for the teens to have spent the evening without their devices. No hostess — especially no 13-year-old — wants her guests to feel odd or alienated. Frankly, it would have meant social death for the girl if some censorious adult had told everyone to grow up and put their phones away.
Instead, we adults, in a friendly, shoulder-shrugging way, deplored the general callowness of teenagers and raised our voices a little so that we could hear each other over the screeching.
It’s tempting to criticize teenagers, isn’t it? Yet the longer I live, the more I wonder whether it isn’t actually a way to create cover for adults who are just as naughty — in this case, just as tech-addled — but who have the social adeptness to conceal it better than, say, your average 15-year-old.
Take a friend of mine, a refined Presbyterian with beautiful manners who is definitely old enough to know better. On a recent Sunday, she arrived at church, slid into her pew, and suddenly felt what she calls, “an overwhelming desire.”
It was not her yearning soul, thirsting for heaven. It was her twitchy brain, thirsting for her iPhone.
“In my defense, the service hadn’t quite started yet!” she told me. “I just wanted to check the Scrabble game I was playing, to see if my opponent had made her move.”
Her husband, appalled, began jabbing at her with his elbow and making horrified faces. She slid the device away, abashed. But she was dying to get back to her game.
Texting while we drive, taking calls in the middle of conversations, checking e-mails at the movies: We’ve all been in the grip of the devices we’re gripping for so long now that it’s almost beyond remarking. In what circumstances won’t we scroll down? Who won’t we interrupt, or ignore?
Sit at a coffee shop for 15 minutes or so (if you can keep from checking your BlackBerry) and regard, if you dare, what we have become. Most drivers are on the phone; most pedestrians are bent over their devices in apparent worship. In truth, we “absent present” adults make those teenagers at the bat mitzvah seem civilized in comparison. At least they were interacting with the people in the room.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
