Poet's Corner

[alexed]

Why do cell phones make us stupid?

Hit ‘send’ and the whole world just disappears

By Lisa Napoli
MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR

Sept. 1 — Amsterdam Avenue and 93rd Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a lazy summer midday. Young woman in belly shirt, standing at the southwest corner, steps off sidewalk to cross against the light. A massive truck, speeding, turns the corner, just narrowly averting squishing her like a bug. Young woman doesn’t flinch or even seem to notice; she’s yapping on her cell phone like it was the most important conversation in the world.



YOU’VE SEEN THIS BEFORE. In fact, you’ve had it happen yourself. It’s an irrefutable fact of the modern age: Cell phones make you stupid.
Last week I was in Penn Station on Friday afternoon and I dialed the friend I was going to visit to say which train I was catching. It was a legitimate, non-gratuitous use of the cell phone — one of the reasons it is such a lovely invention. Anyhow, as I talked, I wove rudely into the passing, urgently propelled crowd. An annoyed New Yorker gruffly muttered, “Watch out, lady” and jolted me out of my stupor. (Better than being hit by a truck.)
Now, I’m normally a hyper-respectful pedestrian, overly cautious of my space and that of others. Frustrated beyond belief when others aren’t the same. But I cop to it: The use of the cell phone made me temporarily insane. Or, at least, stupid.
At a party the other night, I asked my friend Nancy, one of the few people left in the free world who does not own a cell phone, her thoughts on this thesis. She lit up enthusiastically, but she offered a different perspective. Cell phones don’t just make you stupid as far as navigating the streets, she suggested. They make you stupid because they are eroding the art of conversation, filling the air with the banal.
The ability to focus on the moment is vanishing, along with the ability to conduct a meaningful conversation. Discussions are becoming more like MTV edits.

Evidence, she said, the people who must call someone while they’re walking the aisles of the grocery store and then yammer on about absolutely nothing. Can they simply not be alone? Nancy wondered. Do they need to share every experience, however mundane, to validate their actions, themselves?
Almost worse: Conversations in which someone must narrate to the person on the other end where they are and what exactly is happening. (“Aisle three has a new brand of Oat-ee-os, and man, I can’t believe how they’ve restacked the jalapeno peppers!”)

HANG ON, LET ME JUST GET THIS CALL
The ability to focus on the moment is vanishing, along with the ability to conduct a meaningful conversation, Nancy pointed out. Discussions are becoming more like MTV edits, she said — moving quickly from one subject to a next, never really dwelling on one idea for very long. Empty calories for the mind.
(At this moment in our chat, I excused myself to use the ladies room and my cell phone, stuck in my pocket, rang as I closed the bathroom door. This is an entirely other scourge you can discuss among yourselves.




Nancy and I are not the only people who feel this way, of course, and others are investigating the subject more deeply and authoritatively — with troubling empirical results. A survey conducted last year by the Japanese telephone company NTT DoCoMo found that kids who carry cell phones do worse on tests than kids who don’t carry phones. (Japanese are clearly more honorable than Americans, who would never have released such unsavory results about their own product. Another scourge for discussion at a later time.)
A Japanese sociologist has even written an entire book about the problem of the impact of cell phones on youth, “The Superficial Social Life of Japan’s Mobile Phone Addicts.”
Its author, Hisao Ishii, told the British newspaper The Guardian last year, “Teenagers can be seen taking advantage of every spare minute to touch base with their friends. ... Indeed, many become extremely uneasy if unable to contact their peers countless times each day, fearing they are becoming socially isolated.”
Now, if only they all discussed their homework!

KEEPING STUPIDITY AT BAY
A lively debate broke out on the subject of cell phones and stupidity on TessRants.com, a blog I stumbled upon. The focus there is the controversial notion of whether drivers should use the phone.




Tess takes a stand on this one after observing a bit of yammering and driving stupidity: “People that cannot walk and chew gum at the same time should not be driving while cell-phoning. For that matter, people that cannot talk while they’re walking should not be chewing gum. And if you can’t chew while talking then, good for you cause you really shouldn’t be doing that anyway.”
We’ll forgive her grammatical errors because she makes a good point, even if she does ignore the fact that chewing gum should be outlawed.
However, one of Tess’ readers makes a good point, too. He reminds us that stupidity, and by extension, thoughtlessness, existed long before certain technological innovations. It seems fairly easy to answer the question, “Which came first — stupidity or the cell phone?” But the next logical question is how to teach people, now that cell phones are an irrefutable part of our lives, how to keep the stupidity at bay. At least long enough so someone doesn’t get squished.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/800979.asp