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79-Year-Old Fights With Man Half His Age Over Mobile Phone Usage
from the fun-for-everyone dept
We just wrote about how the best method to enforce mobile phone etiquette is through peer pressure from those around you, but not everyone seems receptive to such things. A 79-year-old man has been sentenced to probation after physically fighting with a man half his age, over the use of a mobile phone in a public place. The real issue was that the man took offense to the younger man's loud, repeated cursing into the phone. He asked the phone user to take the conversation outside, but was ignored, and eventually struggled to take the phone away, leading to a bit of a fight. While he did get probation, it appears that a lot of people, including many in the court room, are happy with his efforts to get an obnoxious mobile phone user to shut up. This is just the latest in a long line of examples about how mobile phone use seems to bring out quite a bit of anger in many people.
Reader Comments
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Cellphone rights
Ultimately the problem is urbanization, which over time crams us all into smaller and smaller chunks of physical space. I live in an apartment maybe 1/20 the size of my parents' house, and when I leave for work I get on a bus crammed with people, many of whom I wouldn't care to associate with otherwise. Cell phones exacerbate the problem by making small spaces feel even smaller; a man ten feet away from me shouting into his phone is every bit as intrusive as that other guy squeezed up against me, the better to share his body odor.
Basically what we have here is one dimension of the modern crisis of privacy. There was a time not so long ago when your nearest neighbor might live an hour or more away; now he's across the hall, and he insists on blasting his questionable taste in music at precisely those moments when you most need peace and quiet. So you do what you can: you put on headphones to play your own music; you wear sunglasses to avoid eye contact; you keep your gaze focused out the window or toward the ground or up to the sky to preserve the illusion that you're not constantly surrounded by people you don't really like. This is the modern condition, and guess what: it will only get worse.
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I work for a major airline and several of us in management think it's a horrible idea to abolish the ban on in-flight cell phone use. We joked that the old smoking/non-smoking sections will have to be used again...
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I can't wait til some doofus sues the airlines because he was yakking on a cellphone while the pilot warns passengers that they are about to hit major turbulence.
On top of that, it's the fact this guy was using foul language, I've experienced this many times in NYC.
I think urbanization also strips away the civility we once enjoy also.
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Why does urbanization strip away civility?
Not argueing against you or anything, just curious on your opinions.
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Because civility is, in essence, adherence to a set of rules and it takes time and effort for people to learn and adapt to those rules. Unfortunately urbanization generally forces people to deal with one another before they work out the rules for doing so.
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Interaction with others is how those rules are learned.
It's called peer pressure.
The problem isn’t with urbanization - there were urban centers, with high population pressures, 100 years ago…
The problem is that people feel that they have the right to do whatever they want, and the “Don’t you try to oppress me with your rules… man…” hippie mentality. People have forgotten that we live in a society, and as such the society has the right to impose it’s rules on you - even if you feel oppressed by it. That is the price you pay for living in society, and reaping the benefits of collective living. Don’t like it? Move to Iowa where you are isolated from other people and you can do whatever you want.
We need less civil disobedience, and more civil obedience.
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Wouldn't it be funny if we discovered in years to come that public cellphone use was correlated with instances of public intoxication, public lewd behavior, and public urination? I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
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