We begin this week's column with a stunningly beautiful quote from
Anais Nin (brought to our attention by the inimitable siteBrainpickings).
Read it slowly because it's that good.
(Yes, we're enculturating you in
Netiquette. We can hear the shouty, complainy e-mails already.)
"The secret of a full life
is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if
you might not be there tomorrow. ... This thought has made me more and more
attentive to all encounters, meetings, introductions, which might contain the
seed of depth that might be carelessly overlooked.
"This feeling has become a
rarity, and rarer every day now that we have reached a hastier and more
superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a greater amount
of people, more people, more countries. This is the illusion which might cheat
us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us. The dangerous
time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human
intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater
and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision."
Nin wrote those
words in 1946, but she might as well have been writing them today. She starts
with a YOLO and ends with a contemporary-sounding
rumination of just how horrible we've all become now that we hold the power to
be in touch with millions of people in the palms of our hands.
That's right, we're talking about
how annoying and rude and antisocial we've all become with our smartphones and
tablets. As CNN investigates all the ways mobile devices are changing our
lives, we'd like to peel our eyes off our glowing screens long enough to
recount our top eight egregious handheld errors.
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These are things you literally
could not do before the www went mobile; now we're embarrassing ourselves all
over the place. Please stop:
1. Drunk
-tweeting, -texting, -Instagramming, etc.
Long gone are the days when the
only witnesses to your inebriated ramblings were other bar patrons who also saw
you stumble from your bar stool to the ground. Whether you're able to keep it
together with spelling and syntax (in which case, you've just got the world
going, "Wait, she wants to do WHAT to Paul Ryan?!"), or your typing
skills erode quickly, alcohol
and mobile devices don't mix.
2. Fooling
around on your phone whenever you have a spare moment.
As writer Austin Kleon writes in
his alarmingly cute book, "Steal
Like an Artist," we
need unstructured time for creativity to foster, down time in which we mess
around and let our disconnected thoughts gel into cool ideas.
If you turn every spare moment (a
red light, a line at the salad station, a ride in the elevator) into an excuse
to check your Cinemagram feed, you just won't have those artistic a
ha! moments. (And no, "Draw Something" doesn't count.)
3.
Passive-aggressively whining for the whole world to see.
Look, we all have our personal
stock of First World Problems, frustrated complaints with the minor injustices
committed by a cruel, uncaring world. That's been true since the dawn of time.
Now we just have myriad means of expressing them.
Nobody cares about your thinly
veiled railings against your ex or roommate or employer, OK? Unless
you've scribbled it on a notepad,
in which case you should share it with the world on. So that we can laugh at
you.
4. Being
really, really scared to actually use the phone.
Phones and tablets have made it
oh so easy to communicate without using our voiceboxes. This is bad for
relationships for oh
so many reasons. Anais Nin would just hate it. Hit "dial"
and enjoy the time-honored pas de deux of two humans, you know, talking.
5. Missing
your favorite band's concert because you're so busy taking crappy photos,
letting your phone ring and fiddling with your phone during the set.
Your hard-of-hearing, reformed
punk-rock uncle was right: Concerts really WERE better back in the day, not
necessarily because music really meant something, man, but because the audience
actually paid attention and sang along and danced instead of holding their
phones in the air and spending 30-plus seconds trying to find the shutter
button on the
front of the screen.
Your punkle would be so disappointed
if he still made it out to shows today.
6. Texting
salacious pictures.
The ritual sharing of NC-17
photos used to be a complicated analog affair involving Polaroids and furtive
looks. Nowadays, people just drop trou,
snap and send. Analyze THAT, Anais Nin.
7. Turning
your friends into enemies with videos of them.
Camcorders have become tiny and
discreet and as user-friendly as checking your e-mail. This is potentially bad
news for those people you hang out with, as you hold in your hands a recording
device that can humiliate
them forever.
Set ground rules and roll the
camera judiciously, lest you wind up publicly shaming a friend for her foul
mouth, caught-on-film fart or unpopular political opinions.
8. Letting
your seething anger leach out into the world at large.
Humans have always done stupid
things when they're emotionally riled up. Now, those tantrums and rages and
outbursts are shared and cached for the
world to see. Take a deep breath and put down the smartphone.
9. Texting
while walking.
Rarely
does this go well. Whatever's so urgent can probably wait a few
minutes. Or you can, you know, actually call the person (see No. 4).
10. Using
your phone in the bathroom.
Don't. Just don't.
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