What I like about this rant is that you’re not criticizing the fact that people are using mobile devices in trans-social ways (eg. to be social with people not physically present) but just taking mobile use to really damaging extremes. I think it’s possible that mobile tech is making us bad at social behaviour, just as the online speech led right away to the introduction of flame wars, and cars created road rage, both by creating a sense of separation that seems to make us feel ironically safer when we’re hurting people, and yet just as vulnerable when we’re the ones being attacked.
But I’d also say that it’s the sign that we’re in a real “frontier” time with mobile stuff.
We’re still catching up etiquette with the new devices, and I wonder if we’ll have to develop a kind of meta-etiquette with the speed of technology change, that will pre-emptively guide how people expect to use new technology.
And also technology needs to change: there are a lot of ways that tech can work better with the realities of being mobile. This wouldn’t help with the extreme examples you mention but with less egregious annoyances.
One of my favourite examples is the Nintendo DS, which introduced the simple quality of being ridiculously easy to stop playing at a moment’s notice: you just close the lid, and it’s done. That one feature alone made it a great mobile gaming device, because the essence of mobile gaming is that you should be able to stop and start easily. But there’s more to be done.
For example, what if there were a way to more easily switch between texting and voice calling? You can see that more easily with apps like Voxer and Apple Messages, that integrate voice messages easily together with pictures and text. I wonder if we could have an etiquette couples with technology that would seamlessly enable us to switch a conversation between modes? In a way we’re still partly stuck in our telephone etiquette between the old “my phone is attached to my house” era and the modern reality that you don’t know where I’m talking to you from or who else is here.
A while ago there was a video popularizing a short code for communicating, “I’m about to start driving, so I can’t respond to texts.” It probably says something that I can’t remember off hand what that was. But maybe all phones need to be set up to make it really easy to communicate “not available” — both automatically when you’re driving, and also by hand.
It’s not that technology will stop people from being rude, but it can make rudeness stand out more clearly by removing a lot of the grey area. If there’s tech and etiquette that make it easier to shift modes with a phone conversation, most people will simply stop talking loudly on cell phones when it’s inappropriate, and the few people who still do it will stand out more clearly as jerks.
