Clarissa's Blog

I keep wondering if people are genuinely incapable of retaining any memories of the not-so-distant past or if their desire to be crabby old farts overpowers all reason. See, for instance, the following preachy peace about the horrible, gadget – dependent youngsters:

Every day, I see two people having lunch with one another, both glued to their cellphones, not talking. And I cannot help but think: something valuable is being lost. What is the point of scheduling a lunch date with a friend when your attention is somewhere in digital la-la land?

Working on a college campus, I see many situations like this. Someone forgets their cellphone at home and suddenly it seems as if the earth is crashing down. Cellphones have become the new-age security blankets.

And the judgmental old lady proceeds to inform us that “authentic in-person conversations” are now less frequent. I’m sure she had tons of authentic conversations as she trudged to school barefoot in the snow but anybody with either the memory of pre-cell phone times or a capacity to read knows that absence of gadgets does not guarantee either authenticity or in-person conversations.

The number of works of literature depicting people’s incapacity to have a conversation is enormous. If we are talking specifically about lunchtime conversations, I can recommend Dorothy Parker’s great short story “Too Bad” whose protagonists get divorced because they can’t think of anything to say to each other at mealtime. As we all know, Parker wrote long before cell phones came into existence.