标签: texting

The times they are a-changin', as Bob Dylan would say. For example, technologies that we couldn’t have dreamed of when I was a kid have already come and gone (think "pagers" -- need I say more?).   Then there are new ways of communicating. I remember a few years ago when Star Trek-esque Bluetooth earpieces first started to appear on the scene.     My mother-in-law is an early adopter of technology. She scooped up one of these ear pieces as soon as they came out. Just to add to the fun, she keeps her phone set to auto-answer.   She came to visit. She has long hair. I had no idea she was wearing a Bluetooth earpiece. I took her to the local supermarket. Someone called her on her smartphone. From my perspective, she suddenly started gesticulating frenziedly and babbling on about rambling topics.   I honestly thought she'd gone insane. I didn't have a clue what to do with her. Then I started to imagine what my wife, Gina the Gorgeous, was going to say: "When you left the house, my mother was perfectly reasonably sort-of could pass for normal (in a dim light). Now, after just half an hour with you, she's a raving lunatic!"   Given the circumstances, it would probably not go down well if I were to retort: "So nothing really changed, did it?"   It actually took me quite a while to realize what was going on. Now, just a few years later, I think nothing of seeing ladies waving their hands around and warbling to themselves as I wander through the supermarket (it may even be that some of them have Bluetooth earpieces also LOL).   Or take texting. I read an article recently that said young people have little interest in email -- they just text each other. I think that article was right. My 20-year-old son, Joseph, never looks at the email account I set up for him. Whenever I look at Joseph, he's texting someone. In 2012, a 17-year-old teenage boy from Wisconsin won $50,000 at the annual National Texting Championship, which was held in New York City. When I get home, I must remember to tell Joseph that he needs to work harder on his texting skills.   Now, you may wonder why I'm waffling on about this. It all started this morning when I was driving into work and I heard a report on the National Public Radio (NPR). You often hear about the dangers of texting while driving, but (as per this video ) it seems that there are an increasing number of accidents whilst texting and walking.   I seem to recall that some university did a study on this. They found that people who text and walk typically perambulate 20 to 25% slower than the non-texting fraternity. Furthermore, without consciously thinking about it, they lift their feet to exaggerated heights when navigating curbs.   It appears that walking while texting is becoming endemic; so much so, in fact, that a city in Belgium has set up special walking lanes for people who are texting. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Is it just me, or do you too feel like shouting: "Stop the world -- I want to get off!"

What is one thing in common among the airports of China, the US, India, Europe and pretty much everywhere else? You have to be very alert to avoid the masses of people walking around while staring, transfixed, into their mobile devices. The roads of the world are filled with drivers yakking on their phones and texting/emailing friends and associates. Not a few even update Facebook pages while behind the wheel. According to " The Problem With Hands-Free Dashboard Cell Phones " ( Communications of the ACM, April 2013 ) , GM is modifying OnStar to allow drivers to do hands-free Facebook updates at highway speeds. One wonders what makes a social media update more important than road safety. A helicopter accident that killed four people in 2011 may be, in part, attributable to the pilot's texting. And 25 people were killed in 2008 when a railway engineer felt his text messages were more important than safety, and he missed a red signal. A recent news story indicated that pedestrian fatalities in Virginia, United States have jumped by a third in one year, attributable at least in part to the attention-sucking vortex of the LCD screen. Authorities are concerned about the drivers, of course, but apparently not a few of these accidents come from people walking, distracted by their phone, through busy intersections. At least one app displays the scene ahead, so those whose heads are buried in the e-world can see where they are going. Distractions are hardly new; plenty of young drivers have rear-ended others while fiddling with the radio. Years ago a funny slide show, clearly photoshopped, correlated crashes to male drivers ogling pretty women. Maybe this is Darwin at work. Alas, the victims are often innocents who just happen to be in the path of someone else's distraction. Then there's the general rudeness which is amplified by these devices. The person who won't get off the phone while checking out of the store. Those who insist on non-stop texting in meetings. A recent article said there's a push on to educate young job seekers that, no, it's generally not a good idea to take text messages in the middle of a job interview. Any technology can be abused. I well remember my dad's red face over our tying up the single land-line with long conversations with our girlfriends. But that wired tether limited the problems. Now, the entire world is a phone booth and Internet cafe. The mobile world we engineers have created is truly astonishing. A smart phone is a breath-taking device; a nexus of vast amounts of technology that simply couldn't have been imagined just a handful of years ago. It probably has a hundred billion or more transistors in a pocket-sized form factor. It's great to be accessible out of the office. If it weren't for texting I'd hardly ever hear from my kids. Our technology empowers us in many important ways. But, as someone said (Voltaire?), with great power comes great responsibility. Who is in charge? The device or common sense? I fear that the tech is advancing faster that we can—or chose to—adapt to it. What's your take?

This is might come out a tad cynical, but we continue to marvel at how much texting young people seem to do these days. It's almost like they are oblivious to the world around them. However, there is one advantage as you will see when you reach the bottom... Having coffee with friends .   A day at the beach.   Cheering on your team.     Having dinner out with your friends.   Out on an intimate date.   Having a conversation with your BFF .   A visit to the museum .   Enjoying the sights .   Nuff said?   Of course, one of the benefits of all this texting is that innocent bystanders (people sitting at the next restaurant table, people sitting in the next bus seat etc.) don't have to listen to these young people's inane telephone conversations anymore! So it's true—every cloud does have a silver lining :-)  

(Note: Bob Pease departed last June, ironically returning home from Jim William's—another analogue guru—funeral. I have been at a loss for words, but decided to honour Bob's memory by plagiarizing his ineffable "what's all this stuff, anyway" headline. ) A wag once said that it would have taken a truly prescient person a century ago to realise that Henry Ford's creation would revolutionise the sex lives of teenagers. The car is a form of transportation, but it has become so much more. A restaurant. A bordello. Movie theatre. And now a telephone booth. Here in Maryland it's against the law to use a hand-held cell phone while driving. It's also illegal to text while driving. Text while driving? I can barely text while sitting still. First one has to hold the phone at exactly the right distance so, with a minute or two of head tilting, one finds that tiny spot in the progressive lenses so the screen isn't blurry. Then search through pages of apps to find the SMS utility. Punch at the keyboard – whose keys are so small misses occur more often than hits. No problem, the phone corrects spelling errors, but invariably embarrassing mis-corrections get sent out. Then there are the hazards of public spaces. Signs often ban skateboarding, but that activity has a fraction of the peril of walking. For pretty much everybody is strolling – or even sprinting – with cell tightly gripped, staring into the display. Head down, typing, talking, emailing, gaming, checking calendars, the common theme is utter distraction. People careen into each other. It's sort of fun, in a way, like bowling, watching the people go down. I wonder what would happen if someone switched on a cell jammer? Would a sea of panicked individuals start shaking their phones, punching buttons, or otherwise try to fix the momentary, but apparently life-threatening, disruption? Or would we see vacant eyes appear as they glance around and think, "uh, I guess I'm in the airport"? I've been in meetings where a dozen very highly compensated souls are fully engaged with at least one electronic device, be it laptop, cell or Crackberry. The meeting stutters along fitfully and redundantly as one after another briefly surfaces from their electronic stupor to ask for the same point to be repeated. Is this the new etiquette? I suspect Miss Manners would be appalled, should she glance up from her iPhone. It's still illegal to use a cell phone on an airplane. Complain about the nanny state all you want, I'll fight to the last breath to keep that law. It's bad enough to be cramped for 16 hours into a space no warden would consider humane. The only conceivable way to make that torture worse would be to be squeezed between two yahoos yakking at 100 db on their phones. Even the CIA doesn't employ such tactics at Gitmo. Ethicist Stanley Hauerwas believes that one should craft moral choices based on what the decision will say about you as a person. I don't want to be a slave to the insistent beeps of any gizmo. So maybe I'm not as responsive to email, texts and calls as some would like. Leave a message. I'll get back to you when I can devote my full attention to our interaction. Because I'm too damn busy avoiding the distracted drivers and walkers.  

This email showed up a few months ago:   "ah 2/3 from the world Champions in thier park ah yes the Phila are back and today its the twins Meanwhile the stopper can he stop the nat spo slide tonight the tigers just teed off on the hapless spos The fightens are back and so is sec 119"   That is quoted in its entirety, and is from someone born and raised in the United States. He went to the same high school I attended in Washington, DC. The Jesuits failed him. The author is clearly an idiot. Or, someone who chooses to present himself as one.   Language matters. Email, texting, Twitter and Facebook are swell technologies, but none of them redefine the rules of grammar, all evidence to the contrary. Too many people miss the fact that when the medium is the written word, for better or worse one is judged on the use of the written word. Electronic communications doesn't have to be particularly literate, but must be grammatical and spell-checked.   Everything we create on-line lives forever. Privacy is dead. Tweet out some meaningless blather and it may come back to haunt you years from now. Employers routinely google ( and, gads, I hate "verbizing" what should be a proper noun ) job candidates. Create an on-line identity that shrieks "moron" and you're likely to be categorized as one.   We make choices in life, and one of those choices is how much care and pride we take in how we present ourselves. Men prefer ties to stained T-shirts in interviews, even though a tie is a hideous anachronism that should have gone the way of the fedora.   Conversely, a stained T-shirt is the expected attire for an engine rebuild session. ( As an ex-hippy freak this pains me to write this, but it's the truth ). When we converse we reserve the word "ain't" for rare emphasis and skip the double negatives – unless one wants to be viewed as an uneducated product of the slums.   The fact is we're being judged all the time, even when your best friend asks "are you alright? You look tired" with concern. When the parent sees chocolate smeared on the guilty youngster's face, that's a judgment that may lead to a time-out, a judgment that will be hard to dismiss even if the kid tries to explain how he had to swim through a river of Hershey's best to save western civilization.   And when your incomprehensible email arrives in a co-worker's inbox, be sure that will subtly bias the recipient's view of your expertise and education.   At the very least, poorly-written communication like the email above screams "I don't care enough to get this right." If it's an email to your child, you're teaching the unimportance of the written word, which is akin to dismissing the importance of education and erudition.   If it's too much trouble to get the spelling or grammar right, remember Abe Lincoln's admonishment: "It is better to keep one's mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and resolve all doubt."   What's your take? Is grammar "like, oh so two minutes ago?"