Cellphone use may be permitted on airplanes. And this is supposed to be a bad thing?
Those who complain about cellphone use in public places seem to imagine that, were it not for the phones, buses, cafes, and the like would be filled with people quietly reading the Classics or scribbling to-do lists. They ignore that loud, obnoxious conversations existed before cellphones, and that they are louder if not more obnoxious when multiple people are actually present. Headphones turned up to full volume, hot dogs with sauerkraut, snapped chewing gum--these all existed before the cellphone, and I'd take overhearing even the dullest cellphone conversation over having to sit near someone consuming a pungent snack any day.
Plane riders should embrace their inner novelists, or at the very least their inner gossips.* Aside from the admittedly annoying rings (which could, as the NYT suggests, be eliminated if phones had to be on vibrate), other people's cellphone conversations can be a welcome change of pace on transportation. They're like two-person ones, except they intriguingly require the eavesdropper to imagine what the person on the other end might be saying. It's incredible the sorts of things people reveal on their phones in public, as though they were talking from the privacy of their own houses. Adult cellphone users, who grew up without any concept of the public, mobile phone call, often do not know to adjust topics to surroundings, which means that a ride on a city bus might reveal that the woman in the seat in front of you is getting a divorce, that the man sitting behind you is a lawyer defending a murderer, and that the young man standing near you just got some. All potentially more interesting than whatever's in your New Yorker.
* Prof. Thomas Pavel convincingly draws a connection between the need for gossip and the desire to read novels. So this is my (perhaps less convincing) attempt to show that this same deeply human need can be met through the supposedly unpleasant act of having to hear the perfect stranger seated next to you yapping away.
Thursday, December 30, 2004
In praise of cellphone use in public places
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2 comments:
I have ridden many buses and overheard my share of blaring cellphone conversations and have never heard anything remotely as interesting as details of a murder case or juicy reasons for impending divorce.
This is what I have heard: Endless permutations of "I'm on the bus," "Put your mommy on"; cringe-worthy interrogations of children about homework; commands to assistants to switch around appointments; a run-down of a renovation punch-list; plans for an evening involving an uncertain number of people, requiring endless consecutive calls to finalize time and place and determine who will bring what food.
The hot dog on the bus will be consumed and its stink will fade; a loud conversation can go on forever.
The problem with cellphone conversations is that they are MUCH LOUDER than ordinary conversations because cellphones do not provide audio feedback of your own voice when you talk into them. Ordinary phones do this, so people tend to modulate their voices when talking on land line phones. Unfortunately, cell phones do not, so people actually yell into them to compensate.
The fix is probably ten lines of code, but hell will probably freeze over and get turned into a Starbucks before this happens.
As for me. The day they allow cell phones on planes, I'll be stashing my boombox in my carryon bag to drown them out.
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