Courtesy? Or Capacity?

By whatever name we call technological gadgets of today – cell phones,  smart phones, PDA’s, tablets, laptops – much consternation trails along in their wakes. When to use them? How to use them? The internets, to which these gadgets are mostly always tethered, are awash in counsel on the when/how quandary. But before I toss up any web-sourced references, let’s use our brains for a moment.We know that how humans communicate has been in flux from the moment we learned to communicate. Evolution in correspondence methods began with grunts and gestures and moseyed on up through speech and then writing (cave walls, stone tablets, and then paper, natch) and then eventually all the way to messenger pigeon, telegraph, telephone and now electronic media – email, text, and voicemail. And our use of those devices has changed us both culturally and even fundamentally. Have a quick look at this clever graphic:There appears to be a fairly sizable generation gap on smart phone usage and perceptions. Younger generations embrace it and deploy it. Older generations decry it but still use it. They also want to put old-style rules around it. The younger generation rarely uses mobile phones for the original designed use – phone calls. Surveys of Millennials (Millenials + Email) reveal almost non-existent email use, rare phone calls, and exclusive texting and social media to augment the relationships they by-and-large form in person, face-to-face, at school. To ask a pointlessly rhetorical question -- which mindset might cultivate a younger state of mind? How much might such mindsets fuel the coveted “fountains of youth” so many long to tap into?I admit it – I have been admonished more than once for “using my phone ‘at the wrong time.’” But what is the wrong time? And why is it deemed wrong? In a life jam-packed with work tethers well beyond the old-school 40-hour-work-week, using the same phone at dinner with coworkers to surf the internets while on an audit that’s eaten my entire week away from home – the same phone that brings me work emails 24/7 – when is the “right” and “wrong” time to be on it? Reality check: the bright line between work and home, professional and personal, has blurred to mere suggestion. Our entire culture has become more informal, from work attire to communication methods. When will the Old Guard deal with this fact of modern life?My phone is the only thing that goes with me no matter where I go. I may leave my purse or wallet at home, but I never leave the phone. It goes with me to:-          Work meetings (I no longer wear a watch because the time is in my phone, and it’s always correct, no matter what time zone I am in.)-          The toilet (This is often the only chance I get to check one of my ELEVEN non-work-related email addresses … as a general rule I don’t actually TALK in the restroom, but that’s more because it’s echoey and kind of weird to have unseen-others eavesdropping on a toilet call, not because I feel like anyone is entitled to “silence in the (public/not your personal throne) shitter.”)-          Lunches (My mobile is my only phone, if one does not include my desk phone, and since no one ever calls me on my desk phone, I do not count it. I can’t go to lunch with the entire world, and sometimes I have to pick up a call.)-          Dinners (Often the most frequent “fun” thing I do is eat out, and the only pictures I am willing to give Facebook the rights to are pictures of my food, and my only in-use camera anymore is also my cell phone camera, which is oh-so-conveniently web-enabled, so … it seems completely expected that people would deploy their phones and its various tools during dinner to share activities and fun. And since we rarely live in the same towns with our friends and family, sharing things to Facebook or its ilk becomes the default way of staying in touch. Who goes home after dinner and before bed, uploads anything? It’s an “in the moment” kind of joie de vivre, let’s be honest.)Why does my phone go so many places with me? To avoid the knee-jerk negative reaction about “bad habits” and “communication retardment,” I want to be honest about my use and need of this device. It is the source of most data points in my life: my phone book, my calendar, my grocery lists, my To Do lists, my blog notes, my pictures (mock “artsy” photography is now practically the sole creative outlet I have on a regular basis, thank you, “career”), my Twitter (I tweet more than I read other tweets … it’s a microblog for me, essentially, and I think myself pretty clever, so I will call it my second-most leveraged creative outlet). My phone has become part of my way of life, an extension of myself, like a leg brace or glasses or my purse. It has my stuff in it. Of course it goes everywhere with me.It helps me not just to stay on track and stay connected; it’s my cache of happy memories and happy contact, because everyone else is just as busy as me. It’s my proactive plotter and my productivity pipeline, both professionally and personally. It’s not just the ‘adult pacifier’ it was decried to be by a project manager who objected to me using it while she ate her dinner in front of me (she ate a lot more than me, and this was the fourth dinner that week, in a month of weeks spent traveling for work). My phone truly keeps me sane in the face of crowded schedules and crowded spaces. It helps me create a buffer that’s both personal and private. For the most part, only I see what I’m doing on its screen, and if it’s being espyed, I can easily shift position to restore my protected Just-Me zone.When I am with other people of personal note to me, I apologize if my phone intrudes by text or call, and I quickly try to put it away when I am enjoying some down time, to minimize distractions. But if it is work-related, and I am bored with the conversation (about yet more work) or the people (do not get me started on the kinds of people I have had to break bread with), I have other uses for my time. Beyond my work product, I do not owe the job and its reps anything else! They are already taking quite a lot of my limited, precious time, more than my sweetheart t or my dog gets by an order of magnitude! Perhaps using my phone at what are opportune times for me is an act of my own personal pushback! Besides, if getting through the obligation of something is ameliorated by the use of my phone, then I am going to multi-task. I get paid to multi-task, as do most of us.Recently, The Job has gone a bit schitzo on a fresh new pique: use of gadgetry in meetings. And it’s not the more obviously annoyed “taking a call” and not excusing one’s self from the room; this is objection to the mere use of any electronic device in any meeting in which you are not actively using the device for the meeting.Some salient facts: my company is 50% through an ERP implementation. Many of us, including myself, are working two job roles: our regular job title, and whatever support we are giving to the project. Some of us communicate by text, because we don’t have an SMS for work use. We are on different floors, sometimes in different time zones, and email usually stacks up and has to be managed in discrete chunks at discrete times during the day. Urgent shit needs urgent methods. To suppose, as management apparently does, that any one of us can show up to what are often hour-long meetings to dig into details of a topic that most of us could have covered – happily – in less than 15 minutes, and do nothing else during that hour … well. Let me just say, as politely as I can, that this is completely detached from reality.I have used my mobile phone to combat “Meeting Fatigue” on countless occasions. Whether it’s been the dry subject matter of a meeting, the sonorous drone of a presenter’s voice, or the fact that by the end of the week my mind is so full of work-stress junk that I don’t sleep more than 5-6 hours, I have found myself stupid with drowsiness too often. Using my mobile to distract my soporific mind has saved my professional rep much too often. It is what it is.At least half of our ERP personnel live in other cities and are spending weeks of their lives away from hearth and home, friends and family. Many of us are in endless meetings. To bar the use of a laptop or cell phone during those meetings is absurd on its face, and my hand itches to slap the faces of the curmudgeonly cantankerous bastards and bitches who think this makes any damned sense at all. Realistically, there is no way to be unplugged in every meeting I’m not running. Half the meetings I attend are for appearance  anyway – so people know I am involved or overseeing. To insist that I not check in with my fiancé or check my calendar to plan ahead for the afternoon or evening is … condemning me to 20-hour days, not 10-hour ones. Whatever la-la land they are living in, it is not 2013 there, or there are no ramifications for ratcheting people backwards in productivity timelines, not forward.In a workplace that regularly deploys GoToMeeting and has top-of-the-line tablet-driven audio-visual aids in its conference rooms, they now appear to want people to bring pad and paper to meetings and Eyes Forward only. I keep thinking this is such a Luddite maneuver – intrusive, micro-managing silliness. Who wants to work at a place that does not have anything better to do than piss-and-moan that not enough people were paying the CEO some attention?This piqued edict arrives in the middle of my attempts to implement a more streamlined (and efficient) ecosphere of working, wherein I stop taking longhand notes in meetings and instead take them on my iPad. I could just email the meeting notes to myself to spruce up before distributing or mail them directly to the meeting participants. Think of the gain in time, to no longer transcribe my meeting notes from pen-scratching to soft copy! Apparently now that will be frowned upon. Because I Could Be Texting My Friend or Checking Facebook. (facepalm) I have already used texts to myself to record thoughts in a meeting; scribbling them on paper means they got lost in the later shuffle. I guess that’s off limits now, too.The suit-and-tie mentality has moved on by a decade now. That sense of enforced formality, for whatever good it did those days and times, has ended. No one has the time to do it anymore, at least no one outside the C-suite without a maid, a nanny, and a stay-at-home wifey. Many of us are multitasking because we must, not because it is fun. We are juggling multiple roles, multiples tasks, multiple deadlines and multiple responsibilities because that is how the modern world has aligned itself, demanding ever-more out of everyone. Any capitalist conservative trying to foist draconian heavy-handed tactics like this should go back and read their handbook on personal liberty. Informality has been driving all kinds of changes in society, and this is one of them. It can make some of us vastly more efficient, so maybe deal with it and stop whining about it. And the innumerable guidances out on the nets are often just laughable: “Don’t use acronyms because many people don’t have a clue what ROTFL or SMH means”??? Oh, make me LOL, Huffington Post! (Test "Etiquette" Pah-leese) The ability to Google the answer to any question is a mere click away. I will not presume how smart or stupid you are about modern communications if you will attempt to not be a lazy Luddite.  If I am on a call, it is because I feel I have to be. If I am doing anything but reading a book and drinking tea in a sun spot on my couch, it is because I believe I have to be. I am not texting in an effort to ignore someone else; I am making judgment calls on what requires my attention in the moment.  If I am on the phone while I’m standing at a deli counter to order my take-out lunch, it is because I am about to go back and work through my damned lunch. I am not that sorry that my not having a quality conversation with the sandwich clerk is considered by others to be an assault on all things Human and Decent. My time is short! Please let me make the most of it without getting your delicate-flower feelings all in a twist. And this is doubly true if the distraction that’s oh-so-rude is silently texting. (Besides, if the behavior of another bothers you so much, have the ovaries to say something in a human, mature way, asking for limitations ad hoc, instead of insisting that everyone be available to stare at one another or listen to vacuous conversations for the mere sake of Appearing Polite!) The reality is that often what is happening in my phone is exactly what it appears to be – quite a bit more interesting than the things going on around me.I admit I, too, dislike the obnoxious loud phone-caller on the train or the occasional meal with a friend who just won’t put down the phone for want of email checking and Facebooking updating. But all this silliness is not about actual cell phones used for phone calls. This is about electronic media use, about realistic use of smart phones for silent communication in a work place (and larger culture) that long-ago began bleeding into our home lives and personal time.For those who say my phone usage insulates me from “human interaction” in places like the elevator or that proverbial sandwich shop line, wherein you presumably want to chit-chat about nothing for 7 seconds … what of consequence can be said in an elevator or as I order? This, too, smacks of the old-boy, traditionalist network that used to thrive on elevator pitches and handshake deals. When we all had time to actually take a lunch HOUR, not just a lunch break. That world has moved on. If you want to get to know me, make more of an effort than wondering why I’m not staring at your face across the elevator or counter. Come by my office or invite me to coffee or lunch. That’s an old school approach to human interaction I might get behind. In the meantime, the world doesn’t work like it used to anymore. Didn’t you get the memo?