So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[Monte.C]

Being hunched over, glued to your phone while walking in public is a sign of low class, a sign that you're a peasant. I don't want to sound uppity, I don't really talk that way, but I can find no better way to say that. Personally I don't have a hard time avoiding the draw of constant "connectedness". Fortunately I seem to be somehow immune.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Did you ever reclaim a pack of defect household stuff in grocery store and two days later, the same pack again hangs on the shelf?
I think, I will message the owner.

EDIT:
I already messaged the owner.

 

[tonyb]

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”

Frequently attributed (erroneously) to Marshall McLuhan. Those are the words of John Culkin, a Jesuit professor at Fordham, in an essay from 1967 addressing the work of McLuhan.

I’ve long found McLuhan personally annoying. His worthy ideas get all but lost by his stilted prose style. Culkin is far clearer.

I’m not in complete agreement, by the way. Our brains aren’t so easily malleable as these theorists would propose. But I do believe our brains aren’t static, and that the ways in which we gather information affect what we make of that information. And I believe that ready access to information afforded by modern communications technologies contributes in most cases to superficial understandings. This seems true even when that information is reliable, which certainly isn’t always (nor even frequently?) the case, as we must all know by now.

 

[Zombie_61]

That's what always throws me. Both about those who are phone zombies, and those (fewer in number by far than was once the case) who smugly announce their lack of mobile phone ownership as the reason they're not phone zombies. I've never found it difficult to switch off the ringer or ignore texts until later. What is it with so many people who either feel controlled by their device - or are so scared they will be that they refuse to have one?

There are a few people in my relatively small circle of family and friends who at least check their phones when they make noise, and sometimes will excuse themselves to pursue a conversation on those phones. One or two have explained to me that they are required as part of their employment agreement to answer their phones even when they aren't "at work" or "on the clock" simply because their employers demand it, and these people want to keep their jobs. Cell phones weren't nearly as prevalent when my back problems forced me into an early medical retirement so I've never been faced with having to make that decision, but I'm pretty sure the moment someone informed me that a cell phone would run my life that it would be during the very last conversation I'd ever have with that person.

 

[Edward]

There are a few people in my relatively small circle of family and friends who at least check their phones when they make noise, and sometimes will excuse themselves to pursue a conversation on those phones. One or two have explained to me that they are required as part of their employment agreement to answer their phones even when they aren't "at work" or "on the clock" simply because their employers demand it, and these people want to keep their jobs. Cell phones weren't nearly as prevalent when my back problems forced me into an early medical retirement so I've never been faced with having to make that decision, but I'm pretty sure the moment someone informed me that a cell phone would run my life that it would be during the very last conversation I'd ever have with that person.

We're lucky over here that our employment laws are a little stronger, I believe. Still, not as great as France where it's now unlawful for an employer to expect a response out of hours (saved for, as I understand it, legitimate emergency situations). Though it doesn't stop my particular bugbear, which is the university encouraging us to let them colonise our phones by encouraging us to download apps that suit them (attendance monitoring), or demanding 'two factor identification' via phones to sign in to work systems, while contributing nothing to the cost of the phone.