Hey you with the phone - listen up!

The poster in the restaurant couldn't have been more appropriate. ''While you finish updating your status, we'll gladly serve the polite person behind you.''


Of course, the irony is no one looked up to read it. My three girlfriends had other reading material, namely checking in their Facebook status or a cryptic text from a new boyfriend. One was taking a photo of the freakin' menu before she'd even read it. As usual, it seemed more important to address those not at the table than the flesh-and-blood friends present.


It had taken three months, several babysitters, a few white lies and lots of good fortune to get this particular gang together. But within welcome hugs and sitting down, the beasts were unleashed, propped like tiny cordless oxygen tanks that may run away at any moment, thus requiring constant attention.


Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/hey-you-with-the-phone-listen-up-20131101-2ws86.html#ixzz2jRqSOG6F

Smartphones Are Killing Us — and Destroying Public Life


The host collects phones at the door of the dinner party. At a law firm, partners maintain a no-device policy at meetings. Each day, a fleet of vans assembles outside New York’s high schools, offering, for a small price, to store students’ contraband during the day. In situations where politeness and concentration are expected, backlash is mounting against our smartphones.


In public, of course, it’s a free country. It’s hard to think of a place beyond the sublime darkness of the movie theater where phone use is shunned, let alone regulated. (Even the cinematic exception is up for debate.) At restaurants, phones occupy that choice tablecloth real estate once reserved for a pack of cigarettes. In truly public space — on sidewalks, in parks, on buses and on trains — we move face down, our phones cradled like amulets.


More http://www.alternet.org/smartphones-are-killing-us-and-destroying-public-life?paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark