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Most People Use Their Phones During Social Events, Despite Thinking It Harms Conversation
Mark Wilson points out that the Pew Research Center has released a new report on mobile etiquette in the age of smartphones. 90% of U.S. adults now have cellphones and carry them around frequently. Pew's survey looked into how this is changing social norms with regard to shifting attention away from physical-world interactions. Most people think it's fine to use a cellphone while walking the streets or waiting in line, but 62% think it's not OK at a restaurant, an 88% disapprove of using one at a family dinner. Disapproval of using a cellphone in a meeting, movie theater, or church is almost universal. 89% of people say they used their cellphone during their most recent social activity, whether it was texting, checking the web, or snapping a picture. Despite this, 82% say cellphone use generally hurts the conversation. 79% of adults say they occasionally encounter loud or annoying cellphone behavior from others in public, and more than half say they often overhear intimate details of other people's lives because of it.
That people know it's rude and do it anyway ... that's the part that really annoys the crap out of me. Go away, and I'll send you an email if you prefer. But stop constantly checking the damned thing, because I'm just going to walk away.
I learned an important lesson about this many years ago, long before cell phones became ubiquitous.
I remember as an undergraduate meeting with a senior university official (a provost, actually), and the phone on her desk started ringing. We were seated at a table elsewhere in her office, but I paused, thinking she would probably need to answer it. But she just kept on talking to me, and the meeting went on normally.
I ended up becoming a research assistant for her, and when this occurred in another meeting, I paused in what I was saying and said, "Uh... do you need to get that?" Her response was very logical and clear:
It was a matter of respect, she told me. A scheduled personal meeting with someone should receive her full attention, since I had taken the time to be there with her. Whether I was a lowly undergraduate or the university president, a scheduled in-person meeting was more important than whatever random person might be calling on her phone. If the situation was truly urgent, there were other ways people would get messages to her.
I never forgot that, and to this day I try to live up to her example. If you're in a meeting and you know that you may need to be interrupted, the polite thing to do is to inform the person you're meeting with at the outset that you might need to take a call or check email or whatever because you have an urgent matter to attend to. (But most of the time, you probably don't really have anything that urgent.)
Doing otherwise is disrespectful. With the growth of ubiquitous smart phones, the temptations have grown stronger, I guess. But if someone is taking their time to meet in-person with you, the least you can do is respect that time by giving them your attention.