2022年11月26日发(作者：myfather)valuable is all this chitchat? The average conversation lasts two-and-a-half to three minutes. Surely many could be postponed or forgotten.
It's true that lots of people like to gab. Cell phones keep them company. Count that as a plus. But it's also true that lotsof people dislike being bothered. The are folks who have cell phones but often wish they didn't. A recent poll, sponsored by the Lemelson-M.I.T. program, asked which invention people hated most but couldn't live without. Cell phones won, chon by 30 percent of respondents.
Some benefits may be overstated. Cell phones for teens were sold as a way for parents to keep tabs on children. That works--up to a point. The point is when your kids switch off the phones. Two of my teens have cell phones (that was Mom's idea; she has one, too). Whenever I want them most, their phones are off. Hmm. Similar advantages are claimed for older people. They have cell phones to allow their children to monitor their health. This may spawn gallows humor on voice-mail messages. (For example: "Hi, Sonny. If you get this, I'm dead.")
Cell phones--and, indeed, all wireless devices--constitute another chapter in the ongoing breakdown between work and everything el. They pretend to increa your freedom while actually stealing it. People are suppod to be always capable of participating in the next meeting, responding to their e-mails or retrieving factoids from the Internet. People so devoted to staying interconnected are kept in a perpetual state of anxiety, becau they may have misd some significant memo, rendezvous, bit of news or gossip. They may be more plugged in and less thoughtful.
All this is the wave of the future or, more precily, the prent. According to another survey, two thirds of Americans 16 to 29 would choo a cell phone over a traditional land line. Land lines have already dropped from 189.5 million in 1999 to 181.4 million at the end of 2003, says the Federal Communications Commission. Cell phones, an irresistible force, will soon pull ahead. But I vow to resist just as I've resisted ATM cards, laptops and digital cameras. I agree increasingly with the late poet Ogden Nash, who wrote: "Progress might have been all right once, but it's gone on too long."
2004 Newsweek, Inc.
Cell Phone
10 Rules of Cell Phone Etiquette. An InfoWorld Slideshow.
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