Cellphone/texting practices

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m 47 and somewhat of a luddite, being perfectly happy to do without many devices nearly everyone seems to consider necessities. I don’t carry a cellphone, tho I can imagine the benefits of one in certain situations - such as to call my wife to tell her when my train home is delayed or I’m otherwise running late. And they can certainly be useful tools for business, emergencies, etc.

I understand that’s just me, and I don’t want to appear to be criticizing folks who really enjoy their cellphones. But I would appreciate it if folks would explain to me their relationship with their cellphones, and how they view it with respect to their interpesonal relationships.

What caused me to start this thread was this statement in an MPSIMS thread about 3 guys in a bar who had just been joined by a stranger:

While texting his girlfriend about our newest acquaintance, Richard says, “What are you staring down there for? You counting your dollars?” Parker replied that he was just texting…

Now I’ve never sent a text message, tho I could imagine them being useful if my wife wanted to tell me to pick up a gallon of milk on the way home, or some other non0time sensitive message that someone didn’t really need to talk to me personally about. Or maybe as the equivalent of passing notes in class. But if I were in a bar with 2 friends, I can’t imagine wanting to text - or call - someone who wasn’t there just to tell them what was going on. And I can’t imagine anyone else wanting to hear about what I and my mates were doing in a bar.

I repeat, I don’t want to come across as criticizing such behavior (that will undoubtedly come later! ;)), I’m mainly interested in learning what appeal such behavior has for so many people.

Another thing that regularly amazes me is when two people will be talking, and one person’s cell rings and they simply start talking on it without so much as a “Excuse me.” I’ve always pretty much just assumed that just about anyone who was physically in my presence deserved better manners than just about anyone who might be calling on the phone, but that seems to no longer hold true.

I’ve had people in my office answer their cells, and I’ve told them to get the hell out of my office.

Finally, before this gets too long, on the train I often see people holding their cells in their hands, or pulling them out frequently to check them. To me, they almost convey an air of a “security blanket.” I really wonder what calls they are expecting/hoping for, that they need to check their phones multiple times in a 30-40 minute period.

I admit I’m an antisocial old git who has few friends and hates talking on the phone. But I’d appreciate at least understanding what so many folk find so useful/enjoyable about cellphones.

2

Too late!

I’m with you, for the most part, but sometimes when I do this I’m just checking the time because I don’t usually wear a watch. I’m not a luddite, but I don’t fixate on the cell phone nearly as much as some of my peers do either. I’m a male, 27, and a gadget nut, but I don’t feel the compulsion to within arm’s reach of everyone on my speed dial, and I also despise the growing acceptance of “txtspeak” in written communication. I fear it will only get worse before it gets better, too. I shudder to think that in years to come, there will actually be colloquial entries in dictionaries for shit like omg, lolz, bff, ur, and their ilk.

I also find the taking of calls during other engagements to be an extremely tactless thing to do, and I’m not afraid of asking people why they do it after they get off the call. Seems most people don’t really care though, and wouldn’t mind if they had it done to them.

3

Texting is one of my primary methods of keeping in touch with people. I abhor talking on the phone, but I fire off and receive so many text messages that I had to change my calling plan to include 1500 texts a month, because with only 500 messages a month I was going over my limit every single phone bill.

I routinely use texts to find out what a friend is doing, to let a friend know what I’m doing, to ask a question, to relate something funny that just happened, to make plans for later, etc… I think nothing of texting in the presence of others, and I would find it totally bizarre if one of my friends refrained from texting on account of our hanging out.

It’s different when I’m on a date; that’s a situation in which I shut the phone off and put it away.

As a result of my texting, I rarely ever actually talk on my phone. I generally use it to call my parents, the occasional story I want to relate that’s too long to type, or if I’m meeting up with someone on the street or at a bar or something.

I never, ever leave my apartment without my phone. It’s one of the four essential items I’m never without (wallet, keys, phone, chapstick). When I lost my phone a couple of years ago, I felt isolated during the period that I spent without one.

That said, I almost never answer the phone when somebody calls me, and on Sundays in particular I’m likely to leave my phone in my bag and go the whole day without looking at it.

I’m twenty three and live in New York City, for what it’s worth.

4

To be totally honest, when I’m alone in public I check my phone often because I’m bored. Part of me really hopes I get a phone call or text message so I can spend a few seconds of my time responding to it rather than sit there, staring into space. You spend your time people-watching obviously, so what’s the harm in someone else spending their time text messaging, or hoping people text them?

I’m not a heavy texter, but I do send them for non-time sensitive things as you noted above. They’re also great for sending lists or directions, so the recipient doesn’t have to write them down. My girlfriend sends me nice little “I love you” notes for me to read at my leisure. I can text her when I need to let her know something, but a phone call would be annoying (like, for instance, a noisy bar or a concert).

On the other hand, I absolutely hate it when people stop conversing with me mid-sentence so they can answer a phone call. I would never do this, and usually turn off my ringer when I’m in other people’s company.

Male, 28.

5

shrug My friends and I text a lot, so if a few of us are out it isn’t uncommon for someone to say, “Dude, text So-and-So and see if they want to come out with us!” Or maybe we’ll be in the middle of a conversation and we’ll realize we can’t remember some little detail of the story- out comes the phone and off goes a text for the answer. I did this the other day when I couldn’t remember what my friend was naming her baby.

Oh yeah, well that is just rude. I always either send my call to voice mail, followed up with a text to the person saying, “What? I’m out right now” OR I tell my companion, “One sec, I have to answer this. Sorry.”

I don’t take the train, but I’m one of those people that is always messing with the phone in my hand. For one, I have a Blackberry, so I’m going to get my money’s worth out of that goddamned thing! :wink: (kidding, kidding).

In all seriousness, I have the attention span of a gnat. I certainly enjoy my me time and take advantage of it frequently, but if I’m bored and I’ve got my little expensive gadget with me, I’m going to entertain myself. Along with texts, my phone also has: my email, chat programs (AIM, etc.), an MP3 player, and the internet. You’ll often find me waiting for my car at the car wash, typing away at my Blackberry or surfing the Dope on my Blackberry.

And as I’ve admitted before, I’m also that person who walks around the grocery store yapping away on my phone. I generally am pretty quiet (at least, I hope- I try to be hyper aware of everyone around me and if I can tell I’m irritating someone, I hang up), so I don’t see the big deal. Like I said above, I get bored. More than that though, because of work, school, and friends on different coasts, it is hard for me to squeeze in time to talk to my friends. So, why not while I’m wandering the grocery store?

Edit to ad: I should also mention that, generally, with I’m with anyone who would care or is important, my phone is off. Period. No excuse for a phone going off in a business meeting, class, etc.

6

Have a cellphone (work requires it) that I rarely use. Once in a while if we’re meeting up with a friend I’ll use it, or I give it to my son when he goes to work so if he has a problem (with driving - not with work) he can call me. As for texting, my friends do it all the time, I don’t. I find it a pain in the butt. My husband, however, who does not own a cellphone nor know how to use one, keeps asking ME to text one of his friends - I finally yelled at him the other day that it takes a whole lot more effort on MY part to text his idiotic messages than it would be for him to pick up the damn phone in the first place! Drives me nuts. I get really tired of the texting really quickly. Usually, I get a long assed text from someone and I call them back. I won’t text back. It seems silly.

7

Actually, I ALWAYS have reading material with me. The people watching is entirely incidental (well, unless she’s REALLY cute!)

That strikes me as a little different than the situation I described, where one of the party was pretty much texting to tell another person what was happening. Just curious, why do you text to invite someone/ask a question, instead of making it a short call?

Does modern culture/technology appeal to or influence your short attention span? I readily acknowledge that what you say about checking e-mail, surfing the web, etc. seems equally as valid a use of “off-time” as my reading - or my surfing the dope whether at work or home!

I SAID I wasn’t going to complain about such practices! :wink: (Seriously, tho, that loudmouthed harridan in Blockbuster the other day…)

I can see the appeal of talking to friends who live far away. That is an incredible difference technology will make compared to my generation - younger people will be more likely to stay in touch with people who move away, attend different schools, take new jobs, etc. But of my friends near and far, I can’t imagine any of them wanting a call from me just because I’m in the store and bored. Nor do I want the same from them.

And I consider a huge proportion of the e-mails I to be pretty much crap - certainly the ones with jokes, links, and such. I would have to imagine I would consider texts to have an even higher percentage of dross.

8

Another shrug here. If someone’s texting, it could be anything, and it may or may not be anybody else’s business. It might be mindless banter with someone else, or checking their phone balance, or giving their mother directions to a bookshop. (I’ve had several of the latter!) If it’s relevant to everyone else present, then you’ll tell them what’s being said. If it’s not, then they won’t care.

It’s just a multitasking element to conversation or to social behaviour, and as long as everyone’s working on a mutual unspoken understanding of this, then it’s no problem.

At work, a lot of things end up being dealt with via texts, because it’s so hard for us to find time to catch each other by phone. The benefit of this is that I’ve found I often don’t have to interrupt a child’s lesson at all. I’m quite happy continuing to talk or listen while texting, and they’re completely at home with such behaviour, even to the point that they sometimes don’t notice it. Seriously. I’ll explain afterwards that it was work-related stuff which I had to deal with, and numerous times they haven’t had a clue what I’m talking about.

I’m another time-checker, like anamnesis. But another reason for holding a phone this way is that they’re awaiting a call or a reply to a message, and they’ve got the phone set to silent or to vibrate (because they’re being polite to everyone else on the train!), and in my experience it’s easy to not notice a vibrating phone in time when on a train or bus.

9

The question can just as easily be reversed - why interrupt the entire conversation, or have to physically remove yourself, to make a phone call, when you can just send a discrete text message instead?

That’s not a good parallel. ‘Forward to everybody’ emails are full of crap, and I thought we’d left them behind in the early 2000s. Text messages are written on the spot, with a single specific recipient, and so are more personal and more relevant.

10

I’d say I make an actual voice call on my mobile about once or twice a week, if that. But I do tend to send quite a lot of texts. My fiancee and I work fairly incompatible hours - between Monday and Thursday we barely see each other awake, so we tend to communicate by text. It passes the time on the train journey, without the rest of the passengers having to listen to our inane conversation*. Plus I can do it in a quiet couple of minutes at work, without annoying my colleagues.

And, if I want to make an arrangement with a friend for later in the week, much easier to text rather than call them, probably interrupt them, or get voicemail where I have to leave a message, then they have to do the same to get back to me, etc etc.

  • or hot text sex, obviously.
11

Hmmm, just looked at my sent calls list…I average about the same.

12

Because often we are in a restaurant or some other loud public place (or somewhere where it might be rude for me to be loud enough for the person I’m calling to hear me). Either that or it is something that is more or less inconsequential, but I’m curious about. Finding out the baby’s name wasn’t important enough to bug my friend with a phone call or anything, but it was just a tidbit of info I was curious about.

Plus, because I’m college-aged, a lot of my friends are coming and going from school and work. While they might not be able to answer because they are in lecture, they might be able to shoot back a text saying, “Ya, be there at 8”.

I’m sure it does; I’m a product of my environment, after all. There was a time when I had a cell phone that (TEH HORROR!) only made calls- back then, I found other ways to entertain myself (usually calling people, honestly). Now I have ways where I can talk to my friends, entertain myself, and not be intrusive to those around me (like a call may be).

I agree completely, actually. It’s rare that I call someone out of the blue just because I’m bored and am more or less harassing them heh- if anything, I’m returning a call or saying hi to someone I haven’t talked to in a while and have been meaning to call. For instance, my mom moved to Chicago recently and we hardly ever get a chance to talk, so sometimes I will call her when I have a few free minutes. My best friend lives in Florida and we are perpetually playing phone tag, so if we finally catch each other and I’m just wandering the grocery store, I’ll chat with her. Stuff like that, mostly.

I actually don’t get that much junk in my inbox (email, text, or otherwise- it’s all the same inbox on the Blackberry). My friends are pretty good about keeping their dumb stuff to themselves. My friend’s ex girlfriend has a bad habit of sending chain texts (which, ironically enough, are often racist. Go figure)- I nipped that in the butt by telling her to knock that shit off and stop wasting my money on spam.

13

Thanks for the insight, Apeman. As I tried to say, I don’t want to say one behavior or the other is better or worse, I’m mainly trying to understand behaviors I consider tremendously different from mine.

This comment of yours kinda struck a note for me:

I guess I don’t usually think of conversation as something that particularly lends itself to multitasking. I mean, I can understand calling someone to “keep you company” if you are doing some mindless task like shopping or housework. And I can certainly do tasks like make dinner when friends stop by. But if I am socializing with friends or family, I rarely feel the need or desire to simultaneously socialize with someone else. I find such an urge interesting - and very foreign to me.

It seems to me that as a rule people who are heavy cell users make far more frequent contact with far more people in their social network, than non-heavy cell users. Do you agree? I wonder whether that could be said to be inherently good, bad, or indifferent? Along the same lines, I wonder if any generalities could be drawn about the - um - depth and substance of those contacts. What are the different effects of a relationship that largely consists of a great number of relatively brief contacts, as opposed to fewer and more lengthy contacts. Do texts tend to be more superficial than phone or in-person communications, and if so, what effect does that have on the individuals and their relationship?

Just thinking out loud. It really seems to me that cellphones - and other aspects of technology - are fundamentally changing certain aspects of how people interact. I realize this is nowhere near original thought on my part. And I thank everyone for their responses.

14

Heavy texter here, and highly dependent on my smart phone for a lot of stuff.

My husband is in Boston, I’m in KC so we text hundreds of time a week. It’s just one more way to make sure we stay in regular contact. We also use the phone cameras a lot to snap pictures of things we find funny or interesting or whatever, and send those too.

And yes we talk on the phone, twice a day.

My phone syncs up with all my MS products so I use it for my calendar, scheduling, note taking (I LOVE OneNote), etc etc.

For the record, female and almost 48.

15

Seems to be the case, doesn’t it? Whether it is good, bad, or null- I really don’t know. I like to think of it as a good thing- I have a large circle of friends I can keep in touch with, hang out with, etc.

Wow, I sound like some lil’ social butterfly, don’t I? In reality, I’m the kind of person that has a smaller group of VERY close friends and lots of acquaintances that I’m more or less indifferent about. For instance, I have 20 contacts in my phone’s address book- of which, 6 are family members, 1 is my roommate, 4 are classmates for my senior sem class (who I frequently have class questions for), etc. As far as people I regularly call and text that aren’t family? 5 people, max. (And 3 of the people I frequently text or call are friends on other sides of the country).

Texts are more superficial, but I think you’re committing a fallacy in your logic here. Just because we communicate a lot in short, superficial texts does not mean that we don’t have deeper conversations, etc. If anything, we’ve got what everyone else does- phone calls every so often, plus an added level of keeping in touch. If anything, I’d imagine that would make the bonds stronger.

16

Thanks, you put into words the way my husband and I use text far better than I did upthread.

Our texts are nothing more than portable IMs, we can communicate the truly mundane silly stuff that happens throughout the day, and knowing about those things helps us stay more connected.

17

I suspect it may be something that will remain rather foreign, although you might become more comfortable with it given time. I described it as multitasking because it most definitely does not replace anything that happens in a regular conversation, but happens in parallel to it…and if there’s more than two people, then you’re silent for the majority of the time. The unspoken understanding is in part, I suppose, that just because somebody is busy texting, it doesn’t mean they’re not also listening. (Hands up who’s listening to music while reading this?)

No. Much of the contact would be replaced, say, by an email or phone call once a week, rather than numerous texts. There’s perhaps slightly more breadth of the network, but the emphasis is on slightly. One thing I’ll certainly say is that with family spread across four continents, it makes time zones less of a concern. People just reply when the wake up/finish work/get back from surfing/skiing.

I think ‘fundamental’ is putting it far too strongly. People’s behaviour changes around technology, and vice-versa. Note that text-messaging wasn’t ever intended as a end-user product in the early development of mobile phones, but only once people started using it did companies realise the potential.

18

Starting with emails and now with texting and IMs, I think the definition of a conversation has changed.

Conversation used to be 2 or more people, face to face, involved in a back-and-forth exchange. Letters, because of the time involved in transportation, seemed to have more of this lengthiness to them. You don’t write a letter consisting of one question, and then mail it off.

With email, it’s not uncommon to write a very short, specific email. They can get long and wordy too, but I send scores of emails a day, many of them under 20 words, asking for specific info.

Texting and IMs take it even farther. It is no longer a traditional conversation, with a beginning and an end, and a flow from one subject to another. It’s much more disjointed and over a long period of time. More like turning to your spouse and asking what Aunt Ruby’s maiden name was, instead of having a 30 minute discussion of who’s aunt used to give the worst Christmas presents.

19

What shyguy said, except for the 1500 a month (amateur!) – my bill had almost 2000 and my brother’s was near 4000 last month total sent and received.

We and our friends all work jobs where there is no e-mail and personal calls are frowned upon or nearly impossible, so keeping in touch via text is pretty much the only way.

Texts are also far less intrusive than a phone call, and I can text my BFF when I get off at midnight and she’ll read it when she gets up at 5. The alternative is to call her to leave a voicemail and end up awakening her, which will start the anger.

BTW, male, 28 – the eldest of my circle. The youngest is 21. We’re all pretty similar in texting habits.

20

They’re writing novels !

Texting is much more prevalent in Japan, because you pay out the wazoo for minutes. Had Verizon in the States, with 450 daytime minutes for $40, unlimited anytime. Here I pay around the same for 50 anytime minutes. So people essentially don’t talk on their keitais, just use them to text.

I skimmed the thread, so apologies if the point has been made, but it’s much less obtrusive to text. In the case you mentioned in the OP, the person texting at the table didn’t have to call his (her?) friend and say “Yeah, there’s some drunkass crazy guy sitting with us. I know, can you believe it? No, no, he’s wearing pants at least.”