yet<\/em>, by the way) is a game changer. It allows the user to communicate with Siri, a virtual assistant who can do all sorts of things, like set an alarm, send a dictated text message, or answer philosophical questions. (When my friend Dwight asked Siri, \u201cWhat is the meaning of life?\u201d he was told, simply, \u201cForty.\u201d)<\/p>\nIn official and unofficial ways, our culture has been learning to deal with normal cell phone conversations in public. But talking to a virtual assistant on a phone gets into uncharted territory. As Wingfield notes:<\/p>\n
Talking to your phone is so new that there are no official rules yet on, say, public transportation systems.<\/p>\n
Cliff Cole, a spokesman for Amtrak, said the train line\u2019s quiet-car policy applied to any use of voice with cellphones, though it explicitly bans only \u201cphone calls,\u201d not banter with a virtual assistant. \u201cWe may have to adjust the language if it becomes a problem,\u201d Mr. Cole said.<\/p>\n
There is a new moral and manners dimension to talking to your phone that is not present when you\u2019re using a phone to talk with others:<\/p>\n
Another irritant in listening to people talk to their phones is the awareness that most everything you can do with voice commands can also be done silently. Billy Brooks, 43, was standing in line at the service department of a car dealership in Los Angeles recently, when a woman broke the silence of the room by dictating a text message into her iPhone.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re unnecessarily annoying others at that point by not just typing out your message,\u201d said Mr. Brooks, a visual effects artist in the film industry, adding that the woman\u2019s behavior was \u201cjust ridiculous and kind of sad.\u201d<\/p>\n
James E. Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers, said people who use their voices to control their phones are creating an inconvenience for others \u2014 noise \u2014 rather than coping with an inconvenience for themselves \u2014 the discomfort of having to type slowly on a cramped cellphone keyboard. Mr. Katz compared the behavior with that of someone who leaves a car\u2019s engine running while parked, creating noise and fumes for people surrounding them.<\/p>\n
It will be interesting to see how all of this shakes out in the months and years to come. My guess is that there will soon be a whole new onslaught of rules, maybe even laws, that are meant to protect the innocents from the rude folk who would talk to their phones obtrusively. This may be necessary, I suppose. But don\u2019t you wish people would simply think about the well-being of those around them before they act in an uncivil manner?<\/p>\n
Of course this is part of the problem with living in a digital world. When I\u2019m engrossed in my own electronic space, either fiddling away with an app on my phone, or checking my email, or updating my Facebook, I am not quite present in the physical world. I can easily imagine the day when I\u2019ll be more attentive to Siri\u2019s needs than to the needs of the real people around me.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Now we have a new challenge to our social order and general peace of mind: people talking to (not on, but to) their phones, their \u201cvirtual assistants,\u201d if you will. This problem was highlighted in an article in the New York Times, \u201cVirtual Assistants Raise New Issues of Phone Etiquette\u201d by Nick Wingfield. Here\u2019s is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":109,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[788],"tags":[9590,16675,16673,16674,16672],"class_list":["post-2556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-cell-phone","tag-etiquette","tag-iphone","tag-manners","tag-siri"],"yoast_head":"\n
How Can You Be Polite When You're Talking To (Not On, but To) Your Phone?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Now we have a new challenge to our social order and general peace of mind: people talking to (not on, but to) their phones, their "virtual assistants," if\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markdroberts\/2011\/12\/03\/how-can-you-be-polite-when-youre-talking-to-not-on-but-to-your-phone\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How Can You Be Polite When You're Talking To (Not On, but To) Your Phone?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Now we have a new challenge to our social order and general peace of mind: people talking to (not on, but to) their phones, their "virtual assistants," if\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markdroberts\/2011\/12\/03\/how-can-you-be-polite-when-youre-talking-to-not-on-but-to-your-phone\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Mark D. 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<\/a>The ability to give instructions to a PDA isn\u2019t new. But, the iPhone 4S (which I do not own yet<\/em>, by the way) is a game changer. It allows the user to communicate with Siri, a virtual assistant who can do all sorts of things, like set an alarm, send a dictated text message, or answer philosophical questions. (When my friend Dwight asked Siri, \u201cWhat is the meaning of life?\u201d he was told, simply, \u201cForty.\u201d)<\/p>\n