We all do it. Anyone with any sort of mobile information gathering device has done it. Fess up. You know you have.
We’ve all checked our e-mail/facebook/twitter at inappropriate times.
I’m most guilty of checking it during class, although I try to stick to just e-mail and news websites. I have a three hour no breaks seminar every Wednesday and by hour two my head is starting to nod. To pretend like I am actively engaged and fascinated by my once-astute-now-boring classmates have to say, I read the BBC.
I read the BBC for most all my news, but that’s another story. Okay and Huffington Post but that’s like the check-out line equivalent of online news so I try not to admit that.
My laptop is my most portable device, and I would expect those with smart phones and tablets and go-go-gadget watches succumb even more often to checking the news at inappropriate times.
Class.
Meetings.
While you are on the phone with somebody.
Church.
All this clandestine checking up on the world has made me wonder what would have to happen in the world that I would interrupt whatever presumably cellphone/internet free social event I was at to inform them of the news. My husband I discussed this one night but we could only really come up with two situations:
1) Somebody shot the President.
2) The U.S. declared war on somebody.
To be honest, I’m not even that sold on number two, mainly because sometimes I lose count of how many foreign conflicts we are in. And someone declaring war on the US is hardly news, unless it’s Canada. We debated for a while if the Pope being shot would be interruption worthy, and decided that for class it wouldn’t be.
So when would you break the silence? How catastrophic/exciting/amazing/shocking would a piece of news have to be for you to publicly admit (beyond just those times when you weren’t supposed to be texting at the dinner table) that you were, in fact, not listening to a word the other person was saying and instead were browsing cnn.com?
