Reach Out and Plug In

I love the way Blogging provides topics of conversation. As I sat drinking iced coffee with my friend Lydia today in the Arlington Murky Coffee after hiking around Roosevelt Island in the stinking heat, I threw out Aileen’s comment about the disappearance of manners and an interesting conversation followed.

Here is my comment on Aileen’s post:

The bottom line is we live in a society of selfish people. Selfish people breed selfish little people. They all think the world evolves about them and they can do as they damn well please (with no thank you.) Children learn from the example of their parents. If they see the parents abusing cell phone use in public, how can we expect anything else from the next generation? I'm happy to say that I think my kids would pass a politeness test, with perhaps a few points deducted from my daughter's score for cell phone usage. But much of our society would fail miserably and not even wince at getting a bad grade. It's sad that good manners have become as passe as rotary dial phones. We gave up a lot when we entered into the new millennium! So how do we get it back? Is it lost forever?

Lydia saw an interesting extension of this, noting that even though we are more connected electronically with music and with friends, it’s a virtual connection. We have traded tangibility for immediacy. This translates into the fact that a person now walks down the street with a Bluetooth earbud and an Ipod and a cell phone to completely mesmerize her to the point of never noticing the beautiful flower or the beautiful building or the beautiful person she passes. She suggested a movie called something like “You and Me and Someone Else”, which addresses this topic. Does anyone know this movie – the exact title?

This type of behavior creates a totally virtual world in which it is seldom necessary to have face-to-face interaction with anyone. We can have Internet friends and Internet tunes and Internet games and Internet shopping and virtually any number of other connections we could possibly want without having to go anywhere at all. It also means there is no necessity to dress up or brush your teeth or extend your hand in greeting.

What a very different world children today live in from the one in which I grew up. We played outside all day with friends, coming home only for dinner some days. We rode our bikes to the park. The only electronic staple in our lives was the television set, where we often took an afternoon break to watch LoonyTunes. In the South, we said “Yes Ma’am” and “No Sir” and never addressed adults by their first names. Manners were not optional.

Did the presence of manners and the absence of electronics make us better people? Probably not, but ours was a different world back then before life became virtual.