“Stop Being a Freak and Just Look at Your Phone”

"Like one time I went to a San Francisco meditation class and some guy kept making passive aggressive requests that began “I would be grateful if…” Later, when he inevitably got into an argument, the guy kept saying the word “humbly,” as in “I humbly disagree” and “Humbly, I think you’ve got it all wrong here.” It was a cartoon version of what one might expect from a guy in a meditation class in a city where people are obsessed with power, but try very hard not to be. So I wrote it down and filed it under “Meditation Guy.”...

One afternoon I walked from the Mission to downtown to log the many different ways people use smartphones to communicate intentions without words. When people meet for coffee, their phones are out on the table. Phones are hidden for a proper lunch, at least until the check comes. Sitting on the grass in Union Square I watched a guy bump into an acquaintance that he clearly didn’t want to talk to. I could tell because as soon as the other guy called his name the first guy pulled his phone out of his pocket. As the conversation wore on he slowly unspooled his headphones as if to say Hey man, I gotta go...

I can come up with a long list of reasons why you should be a lot more worried about people who are on their phones than people who are off them. But culture is a weird thing. Sometimes we want to be pure and above it all, to be observational. Other times we want to fit in. At that moment, in that bar, anyone not looking at their phone was presumed to be a serial killer."

https://medium.com/@ConorDougherty/stop-being-a-freak-and-just-look-at-your-phone-355f8450aa89

I enjoyed these observations.

I feel like right now we're in a wiggle-space where we have these new parts of society and we haven't figured out how they fit with other social norms. Like, there was probably a lot of weirdness about cars when they first started to be a thing - how to alert other people that you were barreling down the road; how to decide whether to use the car or the carriage; what kind of journeys were worthy of a car and what kind of places it was okay to take a car to; where to park (!).

This is fun to think about.

Anyway, I think we'll get it.