Phone Etiquette

Discuss this assertion: the world was a better place when it contained no smartphones.

Mrs. Darwin was just posting about the phone issue earlier this week. Here, let me quote her:

But surely, surely we can all agree on this. When you are in a situation when your attention is required, when, even if you are not actively participating, you may be called up, or need to have stored up the information presented for later application; when you are in a situation where etiquette demands your quiet, attentive presence -- church, school, meetings, play rehearsals, band practice, dance class, you name it -- your phone should be out of your hands, put away, silenced. This is not controversial. This is not even being out of contact with the world. This is simply being in the moment you are required to be in, away from a constant stream of entertainment and virtual interaction. It is a matter of courtesy towards the person presenting to you or to others, and to the others trying to focus on that presentation. It is a matter of mental discipline, to train your mind to absorb information that may not be instantly amusing or applicable to you, because it is applicable to the whole project in which you play a small role. It is a good training in silence, not just in the physical silence required when someone else is speaking, but in the mental silence necessary for learning new material and growing as a person. When this mental silence is not cultivated, people and projects suffer, and the culture suffers. 

This should not be controversial, but I think it has become so. A meeting? Where I'm supposed to turn my phone off? But what if it's important?!

I've been thinking about this issue all summer. I have tried to arrange my life so that my phone buzzes only seldom. I avoid giving out my cell number whenever possible. I use aggressive email filtering to boost the odds that the items landing in my inbox are things I really want to read. This pruning strategy should mean, theoretically, a higher proportion of "important" buzzes, should it not? And yet, since I started tracking this question in May, the actual number of time-sensitive, cannot-wait-an-hour buzzes has been...zero. (There have been two occasions in the past 2.5 months when people had time-sensitive, better-now-than-later questions for me about the kids. Strangely, there were phone mishaps both times that kept the calls from getting through. So the two times my buzzing phone might have told me something important, it failed to buzz. In both cases they called my office number and all was well.)

Do I sound smug? I promise I am not being smug here. I still jump when I hear the buzz. Ignoring it takes discipline every single time -- even though I know, based on the numbers from my own real life, that there is less than a 1/1000 chance the buzz will matter. There's a 99.99% certainty that it can wait, but I don't like waiting.

Here's the thing many people don't realize: vigilance has a cognitive cost. Vigilance means that some part of your brain is constantly thinking, "Was that the phone? Should I pick it up and check? No, wait, maybe that was the phone. When is so-and-so going to text me back? Maybe he did and I just didn't notice." Vigilance means that your brain is less able to engage deeply with the world around you. Even a choice to disregard the buzz makes you less able to participate in the circumbuzzular events (hush up, spellcheck), because you are diverting cognitive resources to the decision. 

This is on my mind tonight because my two youngest are attending theatre camp right now. Just like the kids in Mrs. Darwin's production, most of the theatre camp kids are pulling out their phones when the rehearsals get dull. Today one of them showed Stella a video that left her really distressed -- unwilling to be alone this afternoon, unable to fall asleep this evening. It does not sound like a particularly egregious video, given the range of nastiness that's out there, but it made her unhappy for a chunk of the day. I emailed the camp coordinator after my unsuccessful attempt to settle her down this evening, echoing some of Mrs. Darwin's thoughts above. 

I will be pretty surprised if she thinks the solution is for the kids to put their phones away. 

The rules are changing so quickly. Recently I took a kid to a specialist medical appointment. I was being billed >$400 for this guy's time, and yet he whipped out his phone to answer a personal call when I was right in the middle of answering one of his questions. I found this obnoxious. Even though his half of the call made it seem that he had a sick relative, I was still annoyed that he would cut me off with no warning or apology in the middle of a sentence. I've thought a lot about that moment, about how the culture of urgency says, "Hurry, hurry, answer the call. You might miss something if you wait. This is more important." 

I am not a fan of the culture of urgency. But it seems that I'm in the minority.