The announcement earlier this week that airlines have been given permission to allow the use of mobile phones on flights, made me groan. As I have stated below, I am not a frequent flier and with the imminent arrival of mobile phones I am less likely to want to fly. I can think of nothing more horrifying than the prospect of being locked in a confined space with no way of escaping until the door is opened at the arrival airport with a person less than 10 mm from my own ear, shouting inane 'chatter' into his or her piece of grey plastic. At least on a train I can walk away. The bus is similar, but in an aeroplane one is a prisoner. As someone who feels that sharing germs on an aeroplane is bad enough, the prospect of sharing someone else's phone chatter feels me with absolute dread.
The mobile phone seems to free people from all normal commonsense and etiquette. For a start, most people have a need to shout - What's that?!!! Dinner! No! I'm on a train (plane, bus). The contents of most people's mobile phone chatter seems to consist of post-mortems; " so he said, and then I said, then he, then I,... The more embarrassing post mortems are frequently to be heard on the bus or the train on Monday morning. When Helen phones her mate Cathy and gives a blow-by-blow account of everything that happened from the Friday night dancing around the handbags, up until Sunday night's good night sexual manoeuvrings. The most embarrassing such call I was ever forced to listen to was on a bus. The 14 year old schoolgirl had a voice like a megaphone and she had no shame, or not much that was obvious. Some of the contents of the phone call would have curled your hair.I will spare you the details.
Many people feel their mobiles are a type of magic totem or fetish. Research studies tell us that very few owners of cell phones understand the technology behind them. I swear that many people actually, really believe that they function by means of magic. Wherever one goes one can see people gazing into their phone screens and scrolling through their address books. I never know whether people do this in order to validate themselves in some way - "what a good and popular person I am; see, 150 numbers"; or are they looking desperately for someone to phone so they Can 'chatter'. I was once behind a middle-aged couplee in a department store who were looking at buying a cordless telephone ("so we can chat in the garden") The wife turned her nose up at one model since it could store "only 200" numbers. "We want at least 500" she said in her rather shrill voice. Why? You can't tell me that this woman, or even this couple, have 500 friends they want to talk to every day. Most of us, even those of us popular, have anywhere near that amount of 'friends' in real life.Is this an indication of the loneliness that most people feel most of the time? Loneliness and insecurity.
I think that what fuels the need to just 'chatter' in as loud a voice as possible is so as to drown out that negative self-talking that most of us hear most of the time. To drown out our own chatter and to break down that sense of feeling lonely and feeling unimportant.
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