Hear What I'm Saying?

While the Clerks Yak, You Can't Get Through

The last time my friend Evan got his hair cut, a few weeks ago, he could barely keep his eyes on the mirror. Instead, he was mesmerized by what was happening the next chair over.A young woman kept yanking her customer's hair too hard while braiding it into cornrows -- because, all the while, she was gabbing and trying to balance her cell phone on one shoulder.

"He sucked his teeth at first, then grimaced a few times," says Evan. "Finally, I think the retort he lobbed at her was, 'You need to get off the phone. I'm tender-headed!' "

In a world where, everyday and to no one's surprise, zoned-out iPod wearers unconsciously block the center aisle on the Metro, cell-using cabbies barely acknowledge backseat passengers and business execs lunch "together" while clicking away at their BlackBerrys, it might seem as if there are no frontiers left to cross in the digitizing of America.

But you'd be surprised. There's a not-so-subtle shift going on, a migration beyond the cars, buses, subways and streets. A few examples:

Amazing Scene One: A businessman e-mailing from a table isn't even worth a second glance these days. But how about a businessman spotted, as one recently was, typing on his BlackBerry while using a public urinal? That's good for hours of water cooler conversation.

Amazing Scene Two: This past Wednesday, a man was fatally stabbed in front of a New York restaurant. A witness who saw the blood-soaked victim lying on the sidewalk was quoted as saying, "People were just walking by with their iPod headphones on. That was tripping me out, that they kept on walking."

Amazing Scene Three: A colleague recounted watching a bakery clerk struggle with a malfunctioning cash register and ask for help from a co-worker at the same counter -- unsuccessfully, it turned out, because the second woman was chatting away on her cell. "It's $8," the cell-phone user yelled before going back to yakking. Unfortunately, that wasn't the question that had been asked. The first cashier shrugged her shoulders apologetically and said, "She doesn't like it when I interrupt her call."

It's one thing to tut-tut about these situations. But the fact is, all of us who own a cell phone, PDA or digital music player swore we'd never use it in certain ways -- and sooner or later, we've caught ourselves doing just that. Think: Have you ever shushed someone to answer your cell? Or worse, just ignored them? Or maybe you've slowed down the deli line because, listening blissfully to "Thriller" on your iPod, you didn't realize that the person behind the counter was, yes, talking to you . As one technophile wrote me, we all think, "I'm one of the good guys!! [But] it happens to the best of us."

Why are we drawn into behavior we thought we'd never condone? Many people would say it's simple -- it's just plain rudeness, the self-centeredness that grows from living in a me-me-me world where your music, your friends and your work can all travel around with you all the time.

I disagree (which isn't the same as condoning it, I hasten to add).

Yes, every time you interrupt "real life" to attend to a device, you're short-changing a relationship -- but you're also feeding one, with the person on the other side of that electronic impulse. Cell phone and PDA users are constantly balancing the rights and expectations of those in their "real" reality with the rights and expectations of their virtual relationships -- a relatively new situation for humankind. With this double community now a 24-hour-a-day thing, we're still trying to figure out how to deal with it politely. And we don't always get it right.

To really take in what a change this has been in American society, think back to the introduction of the Sony Walkman, in 1979. It's been said that this moment marked a human paradigm shift -- it was the first time people could carry their private worlds with them everywhere, no sharing. Sony co-founder Akio Morita understood this and was so nervous about it that he insisted that the device carry two earphone jacks, so people could listen together. He thought it would be "rude for one person to be listening to his music in isolation," he later wrote in his autobiography.