With their mouths largely shut but their laptops and flip phones open, teenagers’ bedrooms are beginning to sound like the library.
So is the dinner table. On her show May 10, Ellen DeGeneres ribbed guest Lindsay Lohan: “Every time I’ve seen you, you’re out with eight or nine girls, having dinner. You’re all sitting around the table on your BlackBerries.” Lohan matter-of-factly explained that she had “like 1,000” messages to answer.
Not long ago, prattling away on the phone was as much a teenage rite as hanging out at the mall. Flopped on the bed, you yakked into your pink or football-shaped receiver until your parents hollered at you to get off.
Now, Sidekicks and iBooks are as prized as Mom’s Princess phone, and conversations, the oral kind, are as uncomfortable as braces. Which makes employers and communications experts anxious: This generation may be technologically savvier than their bosses, but will they be able to have a professional discussion? —Olivia Barker —Technology leaves teens speechless (USA Today)
Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.
Post was last modified on 26 Jan 2018 10:58 am
Another corner building. Designed and textured. Needs an interior. #blender3d #design #aesthetics #medievalyork #mysteryplay
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Yes, but only because the telegraph had turned the early adopters of the telphone into bitter empty husks of their former selves. And so it went with moveable type, the printed word, and written language.
Seriously, the classical orators dismissed scribes (those who communicated through the written word) with the same contempt that true hackers dismiss "script kiddies."
Hmm... Have I just found a future conference paper topic? "Script Kiddies of the [Twenty-]First Century?" (In 1999, I attended a conference where Anthony DiRenzo delivered a paper called "His Master?s Voice: Tiro and the Rise of the Roman Secretarial Class," which covered the culture clash between the dominant experts in what was at the time the mainstream media -- oral communication -- and the upstarts who used the power of the written word. I don't recall exactly what centuries he covered, though.)
After working in the corporate world for a while, I feel like a bitter emtpy husk of my former self. Do I get to blame it on the telephone then? :-)
"On noes!!!11!! Our children is forgetting how to communicate!11!!!"
Weren't there similar concerns when the telephone was introduced? That it would de-personalize communication and leave us all bitter empty husks of our former selves?