Phone Etiquette Should Change with Technology
I read a blog response to the question "Should kids have phones in schools"?
The post reminded me of the ways that technology has changed through the years.
Last century it was common for people to be on phone plans that charged by the minute. When I was in school, long distance calls cost over a dollar a minute.
Because people were paying to communicate on the phone, it was customary for activity in the room to stop and for people to concentrate on the phone call.
VOIP technology changed the equation. Voice Over IP digitizes, packetizes and compresses audio. It then sends it over the Internet. This means that, in most cases, telephone call are virtually free.
Since telephone calls are free, face to face meetings should take precedence over the telephone. It is also easy to record phone messages for later use.
Should Students Have Smartphones in School?
Back to the question: Should kids bring smartphones to school.
I see smartphones as a wonderful technology that brings an entire world of information.
However, people need to learn a new etiquette. Thise new etiquette should teach that people in the room should take precendence over the phone as the people who are meeting face to face have more invested in the event than the people on the phone.
Schools are the best to engrain such etiquette. For example students should learn that phones should always be off in class and when interacting with friends.
So, my answer is? "Yes!" Students should have phones in school, but we should teach the etiquette the face to face communication is more important than phone use.
Such an education will better equip students for life in an information age that bombards people with irrelevant information.
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I generated the images for this post with DALL-E. DALL-E images appear to be dropping in quality. I still have 20 credits. I will switch to Stable Diffusion when I run out.
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Here is the tweet: https://twitter.com/yintercept/status/1757587782313345086
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Until about 25 years ago, mobile phones were unattainable for the masses. Smartphones didn't really start to take over until maybe 15 years ago. For decades, the only way to talk on the phone was through a handset connected to the wall, and yes, long-distance charges were a real concern. Even in the early days of the millennium, there were different costs depending on whether you were calling I side or outside a mobile network. We have experienced a quarter century of telecom revolution. So yes, it is time to reconsider all aspects of etiquette.
It is handy to have wikipedia references on hand to answer questions that arise in conversation, but smartphones also distract from interpersonal communication. In school, a phone replaces many tools, but can also be a disruption when misused. I see a dual problem there. We need to revisit our ideas of school, but also teach courtesy. It's not an issue with easy answers.
FR, On one hand it allow a lot of new things, like during covid witht the online classe, with a lot of usfull tools that can be added on the phone and allow easier and cheaper comunication. Even considerating all this smartphones bring some bad with it too. Like cyber-harasement allowing bully to continue what started in school after school. The downside could have its own discussion because the downsides depends a lot of how is it used
It is interesting to see how phone technology changed culture. When I was in college it cost about $2 a minute to phone (I guess that is about $10 today's money). I would save up for a phone call. I would quickly say everything I had to say and try to keep the call under a minute.
I still feel this pressure when I am on calls.
Party Lines
There were still some party lines in rural areas when I was a kid. Come to think of it, there was still a party line serving the Outpost and along the river road in 2002. My friend was part of the crew that maintained it.
It is amazing how quickly things changed. In 1999, I worked for a company that developed VOIP. The company fell into crisis when we realized that calls had become too cheap to meter.
Essentially, There was a fixed tax per minute. The tax was nine times larger than the cost of the call. The company lost money because all it was doing was collecting and paying taxes.
It would be better to just charge a connection fee and let all of the calls be free.
I think we are now at a point where one can safely assume that people are on unlimited call plans. If we assume that calling is free, then we should change the way that we prioritize calls.
I am also old enough to remember expensive long-distance calls.
If we had been born a few decades earlier, we would have also had to deal with party lines and nosy neighbors who would eavesdrop.
If you want to be fancy, answer "ahoy-hoy" like Mr. Burns. That's the way Alexander Graham Bell wanted it to be done.
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I am very polite and always take messages. Just yesterday I told someone that 2008 called and they want their hipster glasses back.
Where I live, students are allowed to have phones at school provided they don't use them in class. If they take them out in class, then they get taken away and parents have to pick up the phone at school in order for the student to get it back. It's up to the individual teachers as far as how strictly they enforce that rule.
This is precisely what needs to be done to develop proper etiquette.
The general rule should be that people in the room matter more than the voice on a distant connection.
Now that we have AI that generates voices it is highly likely that the voice on the other end of a line is an AI.
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Here where i live, depending of the grade the phone is more or less used but starting at age of 13 your teachers start to add you to online classrooms where they put the test and homework info. You are not supposed to use the phone in class though if you do the teacher is supposed to take it and ask your parents to pick it up but most of the time they simply ask to put it in the backpack or give it back at the end of lesson/day