Phone is the most antisocial object in a long time
Posted on July 13, 2017 • 3 min read • 601 words
You undoubtedly recognize the following: Suddenly your conversation partner looks at his or her phone and seems to have completely forgotten about you. Or you are talking to someone and suddenly the phone rings. Without saying a word, the other person answers the phone and gestures for you to wait a moment before talking.
What do you do in such a situation? Are you recording him anyway? Do you let your voicemail handle it? Do you let the phone continue to ring so that both you and your conversation partner become slightly irritated by the phone? Do you see out of the corner of your eye how your phone slowly vibrates towards the edge of the table?
No matter how you look at it, you have lost your concentration. What if you had the solution to world hunger at that moment? The perfect financial strategy for the Netherlands? A way to achieve world peace?
Useful
The advantages of a mobile phone or smart phone is that you can call and be reachable anytime, anywhere.
This has, among other things, ensured that the well-known yellow emergency poles along the side of the highway [have to be removed.]( https://www.anwb.nl/verkeer/nieuws/nederland/2017/juli/praatpalen- Krijgen-een-nieuwe-toekomst/) You will never have to worry about being inaccessible again, unless of course the battery of your phone is completely empty.
The same goes for all the information you can get on your smartphone. You don’t have to carry a heavy laptop or a stack of books to enjoy yourself all day long. From that small device, which has more computing power than the computers that put people on the moon, you have access to all the information on the Internet. Never again will a question have to be left unanswered when you’re on the road.
Always available?
Being available anytime and anywhere sounds very useful. And in some cases that is true. If your car breaks down, you can call someone without having to walk a kilometer or more to an emergency telephone. But it also has a downside. People increasingly expect information to be available anytime, anywhere and that they can call anytime, at any time. This seems to make decency standards disappear. It is becoming increasingly normal, well, it is becoming more and more common for people to walk in and out of the supermarket while calling, without having exchanged a word with the clerk or cashier.
Difficult
I must say that I personally find it very difficult. As soon as that thing goes off, you’re already distracted, whether you pick it up or not. If you answer it, you are doing your current conversation partner a disservice. If you don’t answer, you may feel like you’re selling the caller short.
You could quickly say: “The telephone is one of the most antisocial inventions.” I don’t want to say ‘all time’, because that goes a bit too far for me, but there is definitely something in it. The phone does not take your circumstances into account: Are you just brushing your teeth, giving your partner attention, or are you just sitting on the toilet and that big attention grabber rings again.
Many people tend to stop what they are doing as quickly as possible to answer the call. Still, that’s weird. Why should the person calling be more important than the person who currently has your attention or what you are doing.
We are all so used to being reachable that it is difficult to turn off the phone or leave it at home. Still, I think it may be the best solution from time to time.
