I like this posting by Michael Jennings, about portable phone etiquette.
This piece (via slashdot) on how social customs in Japan (particularly amongst young people) are evolving due to near ubiquitous mobile phone use is quite interesting. Amongst the customs discussed is the fact that members of social groups of younger people are contacting one another constantly throughout the day to keep in touch with what their friends are thinking and doing. For doing this, text messaging is a much more important medium than voice. This is interesting, and is an application that the designers of cellphone networks did not anticipate. At all. The same thing has happened in Europe. (The greatest social sin that can be made is now to forget to bring your cellphone, or to allow its battery to run out).
Two other things are mentioned that I have also noticed. Firstly, people no longer have to arrange times and places to meet one another, but plans can be fluid and decisions are gradual rather than at once. Being late is no longer a cardinal sin, as long as you keep people informed about where you are and when you will (or will not) arrive. (I have certainly noticed this. It is probably the number one reason I have a mobile phone). Secondly, people are sending text messages before making a voice call, to check that it is a good time for a conversation. The telephone is a relatively intrusive technology, interrupting you from what you are doing and demanding attention. Sending a text message is much less intrusive, and doing this first is much more polite. (I do this myself, although typically only at times when I think there is a strong chance a voice call will be inconvenient, such as late at night or around meal times. At other times, I will just make the call). Here though is a situation where mobile phones are adding subtlety to etiquette rather than taking it away. Lots of people consider the mobile phone to be a technology that has increased crassness. This does not have to be so, and here is an example.
One of my personal habits is talking to myself aloud. I do this because I like to imagine myself conversing persuasively and I sometimes get carried away, and because I like to prepare myself for conversing persuasively by doing it for real, and also because a lot of my writing starts its life as talking. When trying to get someone else to write better, a common procedure of mine is to get them to step back from the keyboard and to talk, and then to say: “Well, why don’t you put that?” I don’t know much about teaching people to write, because I write too well to be able to get inside the head of someone who does it badly, but I do know that. (And although it’s a bit off my point here, I also like, when seriously concerned with getting a piece of writing just so, to do the final read-through aloud – literally out loud – to ensure that it still speaks fluently, so to speak.)
So, I like to talk to myself out loud.
But, as all we socially aware and culturally nuanced folk know, if you walk along a city street talking to yourself out loud, you risk being classified by passers-by as not all there, or bonkers, as we say here in London. The wise talker-to-himself-out-loud thus confines himself to talking to himself out loud only when not witnessed doing this by others.
But now, the portable phone is starting seriously to alter this hitherto immutable social law. It is now a commonplace of city life to hear someone babbling away to, you know, someone, while actually being physically accompanied by no one. And of course, nine times out of ten, he’s chatting away on his portable. But now that portables are starting to verge on invisibility, the tenth person is likely to be me or one of my self-communing confreres, actually talking to ourselves. For now, we are starting to get the benefit of some doubt in this matter. We are not instantly assumed to be mad, and by the time the deduction is made we are gone, and the observer can think what he wants. It’s too late for a dirty look. Not perfect, but a distinct improvement.
Michael Jennings alludes to the fact that not having your portable phone working properly is a social gaff among the Connected Youth set, and I can report that not even owning a portable phone is starting to become a social gaff also, among the Connected Old Geezer set. When asked by broadcasting researchers for my portable phone number, I tell them, as always, that I don’t have one. But just recently their response to this fact has changed from mild but polite regret to active and incompletely suppressed annoyance. I can remember when the same thing happened with email. It was just before I got kitted out with email. So, I guess pretty soon now I’ll be getting a portable phone.
When I do, I will no doubt use it to talk to others about my various opinions, arrangements, emotions, plans and projects. But for as long as portable phones remain physically observable in any way, I will also use it to talk to myself in public places, by attaching it to myself but disconnecting it. I will then happily chatter away about whatever I happen to be thinking about, and no one will think any the worse of me, provided only that I don’t do it in a train.
Get a bleedin’ phone geezer.
Well said sir! I think the SMS or text message has reinvented the art of telegram prose, and is an excellent new feature. It is indeed much more polite than just ringing someone up, especially as you may be catching them in a library or a lift or with friends.
I noticed in the 70s how rude the phone is as a tool. Because you don’t know who is calling, you are manipulated into treating every call as potentially much more important than the person you are physically with. Phones interrupt.
And now text messaging is starting to repair the damage and enable us to talk when it is convenient for both sides.
Another geezer here.
Unfortunately text messaging isn’t very popular in the US, and people often don’t realize you’re texted them, as sms is used for voice mail notifications, which is most Americans only contact with it.
So you text them, and they think they just got voice mail, check that, and you’re lost between the cracks.
Sucks.
Text Message usage is rising in the US, and as I explain here, I am unconvinced by arguments that the US is somehow different and will never take to text messages. (I also explain in that post how text messaging took off in Europe). Text messaging only really takes off when mobile phone penetration is quite high, because the segments of the market that take to it first (eg teenagers) are often quite cost conscious, and the US has lagged Europe and Japan in penetration. In addition, the US has a number of different technical cellphone standards, and getting interoperability of text messaging right took some time. (This is now done, however). (The fact that Americans took to using pagers, when most of us in the rest of the world have never seen one may have something to do with it, to).
It may well be that by the time text messaging really takes off in the US, second generation message formats – so called multimedia messaging – will be widely available, however. Therefore, the US may largely leapfrog the simple text message stage.
How many libertarians are using opt-in text-message group-broadcasting, so as to send quick messages to all the other activists on a list who’ve agreed to receive the SMSs?
List members could set filters at three broadcasts a week, for example. With an opt-in rapid organising tool like that, we might actually be able to take on the EU and do something positive.
One big reason the U.S. lags in cell phone penetration is relative cost under the U.S. pricing structures. A local landline call, no matter how long it lasts, costs less than a minute of cell usage for the caller. Heck, cross-continent long distance calls are often cheaper per minute than airtime to somebody a quarter-mile away. And receiving a call costs nothing for a landline but the same as making a call on a cell in the U.S. (regulations interfere with charging airtime to the caller, especially if the call is from a landline).
For privacy reasons, I don’t have a mobile phone in the US–I dislike talking on the phone and wish to avoid it if at all possible.
But I do have one in Japan, even though I only spend a couple months of the year there. As the article says, it’s gone from being considered an inconvenience if you don’t have one to being thought downright unprofessional.
Rather annoying, really, but…when in Rome….
Things are changing a bit in the states, I’ve personally dropped my landline period. I have a flat rate phone, no minute charges in or out, no restrictions, etc… cheaper than a landline local + long distance any day of the week.
In the late 1970’s when the telephone company closed its local office to human intercourse and precluded the payment of bills with cash — my favored mode — I lost my temper and immediately smashed my telephone to bits with a hammer and left them on their doorstep in a paper bag. I lived for over three years without one, before the situation just about crashed my career. To this day, I still endorse H.L. Mencken’s judgment that the telephone is “the greatest boon to bores” ever invented. I hate having one, but see no serious way around it.
Never in my life have I seen anything quite like the comm-mania going on Japan. Every one of them looks lost, all the time, as if they’re trying to find their way with remote direction from someone somewhere else talking to them on the phone.
The whole thing strikes me as extremely wierd, but, then, I’m the guy who smashed his telelphone, so you can sort that out.
I note that some years ago, before the rise of mobile phones, people in the US were at first annoyed by answering machines, and made them the butt of comedian’s routines. However, what has happened is that I am now annoyed by not getting the answering machine, if the party is not at home. Maybe its a matter of communication interruptus, where if I leave a message with you I have actually accomplished something, even if you never return my call. Then there is the issue of screening calls, where the party listens to the message to see if you are worthy of their attention, a sort of rudeness at one remove.
Well, if someone wants to contact me, and I want to them to contact me, I want there to be somewhere
Seriously, Brian, you can get a prepay phone for as little as 30 pounds. This will cost you nothing more ever if you only use it for incoming calls from the sorts of people you describe. Of course, there is then the hassle of keeping it charged and remembering to have it with you. For some reason, the cheapest ones seem to be made by Sagem, which is a French company, so you may want to spend slightly more.
Well, if someone wants to contact me, and I want to them to contact me, I want there to be somewhere for them to leave me a message, be it an answering machine or a voice mail services.
(That was what my first sentence above was intended to be, anyway).
Most of the time I prefer to get the answering machine, at least when calling my in-laws or clients.
No-one here making much use of mobile-phone message-broadcasting to opt-in lists yet, then?
Virgin came out with a thing in the US that seems like it will catch on – basically, you just pay when you use it. $20 minimum every 2 months. Much cheaper (at least for people who don’t use them a lot)
Has anyone got a picture of a rally old mobile phone and does anyone know of a good site to find out about old mobile phones.
Has anyone got a picture of a rally old mobile phone and does anyone know of a good site to find out about old mobile phones. email me
Has anyone got a picture of a rally old mobile phone and does anyone know of a good site to find out about old mobile phones. email me
Has anyone got a picture of a rally old mobile phone and does anyone know of a good site to find out about old mobile phones. email me