New iPod

[Vixen]

The same thing could be said about PS2's, computers, TV's, those kinds of things.

 

[Pete]

The same thing could be said about PS2's, computers, TV's, those kinds of things.

True but those things are in your house. With these mobile devices even leaving your home you can stay secluded.

 

[Vixen]

There are places they could be more usable than others. Like the gym, it is hard to conduct a conversation when you’re on a treadmill or an elliptical, and I personally would rather listen to music than talk to somebody when I'm working out.

I could see it being usable for long trips The metro is an ideal place to use a mobile type radio. If you start chatting away with somebody on the metro bus they will give you looks.

I think devices like computers and game systems keep people more secluded than an MP3/Ipod.

 

[Pete]

On the way home I heard about this on the radio. George Will op/ed on the very subject I was talking about.

This is the point I was trying to make but Will of course does it better.

The connection is this: Many people have no notion of propriety when in the presence of other people, because they are not actually in the presence of other people, even when they are in public.

With everyone chatting on cell phones when not floating in iPod-land, "this is an age of social autism, into which people just can't see the value of imagining their impact on others." We are entertaining ourselves in inanition. (There are Web sites for people with Internet addiction. Think about that.) And multiplying technologies of portable entertainments will enable "limitless self-absorption," which will make people solipsistic, inconsiderate and anti-social. Hence manners are becoming unmannerly in this "age of lazy moral relativism combined with aggressive social insolence."

 

[Pete]

And this too

"People," says Truss, "are happier when they have some idea of where they stand and what the rules are." But today's entitlement mentality, which is both a cause and a consequence of the welfare state, manifests itself in the attitude that it is all right to do whatever one has a right to do. Which is why acrimony has enveloped a coffee shop on Chicago's affluent North Side, where the proprietor posted a notice that children must "behave and use their indoor voices." The proprietor, battling what he calls an "epidemic" of anti-social behavior, told The New York Times that parents protesting his notice "have a very strong sense of entitlement."

 

[Pete]

I often used to wonder what was going through peoples minds when they/their terrorist kids are acting an ass in public. This clarifies it, they believe they are entitled to act an ass.

 

[Vixen]

I read the article and although mobile devices may contribute in the over all lack of “good manners” in our society, it is only a catalyst, IMO. The analytical side of me could list a novel of reasons.

People kid’s act like asses in public because parents are touchy feely and think they can rationalize with children instead of giving them a swift (But not to the head )

It makes me glad I grew up in militant household. I get a taste of reality everyday on how my life “could” have turned out without the discipline I endured everyday.