Do you leave your Cell-phone on 24/7 ?

Photo by Mo Riza. (License: Creative Commons Attribution)

Don't you just hate it your travelling home on the bus its say around 7.30 pm at night someone gets on whilst yakking on their cell-phone. Instead of interrupting their conversation whilst they tender the fare to the driver they continue the conversation.

If they those culprits

are not chatting they are texting with the sounds still blaring away on the keyboard so you get that annoying kaleidoscope of beeps that go on forever...The driver has that body language about him which says well Ive seen it all before. I'm used to passenger being rude. You sort of have to get used to it what can you say? Anyway then the poor long suffering passengers get to witness a boring inane conversation that girls often have on their mobiles. Usually they are the dumb blonde type who spend most of the day polishing their nails behind some reception desk. "What are you up to ? . Nothing Much ? How have you been ? Good! We must get together and have coffee sometime ! that sounds great how about say Wednesday of next week. Are you still with rob." "No we split up a couple of month's ago"..."He starting complaining about how much money I was spending on clothes." And so it goes on. More and more each day I am convinced that there should be on the spot fines issues for using Mobile phones in certain public places such as Libraries,chuches,court rooms and even cafes and restaurants ...
Some years ago, somewhere on the upward curve of the digital communication era in which we now live, someone said: "People without mobiles are the new wankers".

The speaker was trying to get hold of a person who was remaining ostentatiously uncontactable, adopting the pose of an eccentric antique hold-out against the rush of a future when everyone could be found at all times. "I don't want a mobile phone," they'd sniff. "I don't want to be contactable all the time." I don't know about you but when I get home at night I want to give my ears a well earned rest from phones and recharge the batteries both mine and the phones.

That someone would not want instant communication and maximum connectivity would seem self-defeatingly heretic to those who grew up on-line - like not wanting a polio vaccine.

What was once the mainstream became an outmoded quirk, as what was once novel and trivial, regarded with scepticism, became the new normal. I wonder, in this accelerating future, if we've lost that scepticism to our detriment.

Every time I read a new buzzword such as crowd-sourcing or microblogging or, indeed, social networking, my first reaction is intense irritation. Then I immediately worry that maybe I'm being a narrow-minded misogynist and the world will leave me behind. Younger generations might be quick on the uptake, following their friends who flock to My-Space or Twitter or Face-book, but they don't use new gadgets or applications for long unless they find continued utility in them.

But grown-ups, panicked by the sight of history's back end trundling away from them at speed, either form steadfast loathing based on blind ignorance - or panic, then scramble to the bandwagon.
One result is that healthy intellectual scepticism about buzzwords has been rolled in with the intransigent Luddite camp and sidelined. Then we get - and I don't think there's any polite way to put this - really stupid stories about Facebook and Twitter.

Unless one was a dedicated consumer of foreign news, for example, the main thing you'd have learnt about the political uprising in Iran was that even Persians have Twitter and YouTube. OMG! A British spy's blue-blood wife, Shelley Sawers, posts the holiday snaps on Facebook without fixing the privacy settings and it's world news.

Several newspapers ran stories when the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, posted a request on his Twitter page for arguments to help Australia's case to host the World Cup. Still transfixed by the novelty of unmediated communications, sensing its own ghost in the room, the media run stories about it. It's kind of embarrassing, like making a big fuss about using a fax machine.

The way that we the people over 30 - jump on any story that has these buzzwords in them reminds me of the way a painfully out-of-touch mum or dad would seize on the name of a new pop star and brandish it, too frequently, as evidence that she or he is down with the kids.

In many ways this is a huge generation gap. Posting photos on Facebook or asking your followers for pointers on Twitter is just not news to people who use those applications daily (6 million Australians, or more than one in four, are on Facebook). It's just what you do.

The thing is there are so many groups using social media in fascinating ways that do warrant serious attention. I once heard a comedian make a joke to an audience - "while you're watching this, your kids are upstairs looking at a cat on a toilet on YouTube", and there's a lot in that.

But there are also academics who use YouTube for ethnographic research on, say, remote Melanesian communities, as well as the way in which Iranian protesters used online applications to get their messages and reports out - new videos of protesters being tear-gassed emerged yesterday.

The same technology has begun to empower protest groups in Burma or let people in China's Uighur province post videos of the violence to YouTube.

There are countless real stories here, and the pace of change is staggering. A little old-fashioned scepticism wouldn't hurt, though.

Then again, maybe that guy was right. Soon it will be people who aren't on Facebook who are the new wankers. Bad luck, Shelley

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