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Textwalkers: Do They Need A Heads-Up?
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Pause.
"Well, I may have bumped."
Hurriedly she adds, "But it was never a disaster!"
What is up with this? Are we helpless in its grip? Can we simply not prevent ourselves from instantly sharing with everyone we know the opportunity for cosmic union over Heath Ledger's death or John Edwards's peccadilloes?
To a scary degree, yes, says Naomi S. Baron, professor of linguistics at American University and author of "Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World."
"First it was just doctors and drug dealers" who felt compelled to be always on, Baron says. But now, "it has to do with insecurity about friendships." The fear is, "If I don't get back, if I'm not sufficiently responsive to an invitation to go out to dinner or a movie, that person will move on to someone else, won't be my best friend."
We also get bored. "Bored with our surroundings, ourselves," Baron says. Studies of instant messaging show young people talking with 15 or 20 others at once. "Just one conversation? That would be too weird," she reports them saying. "Because you're supposed to keep all these balls in the air rather than be bored by 'listening' to one person's conversation."
This is by no means to say that "a technology has to be used all the ways it could be used," Baron says. "You can change behavior patterns. It's not that hard to do." People are learning not to be boors, shouting into their cellphones in restaurants, just as they have learned where not to smoke.
The question is how you accomplish this transformation.
It's not inconceivable that people are bumping into things, says Peter D. Norton, a University of Virginia assistant professor of the history of technology. "In college towns 50 or 100 years ago, people were doing that with books."
In general, "you got a social problem, you got a couple classes of solutions," says Norton. "One is to make it illegal and fine people."
One finds that threat more frequently aimed at litterbugs than people reading books while walking. But even in those cases, enforcement is so rare that it just makes both the citizens and the constabulary cranky, Norton points out.
