Community Corner

Lean Screen Journal: Day One

Building awareness means thinking, not typing.

Last night, our Farmington friends celebrated two birthdays with a lovely dinner at Buca di Beppo in Livonia. And in the middle of dinner, I lost data services on my iPhone. 

No whooping alarm went off on my phone; I knew because I had been checking my email and Facebook account. I even posted a story to this website from my phone, right before dessert.

I'm fortunate that I have understanding friends. Or if they don't really understand, they accept me as I am: an iPhone/Android addict.

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Coincidentally, this story came through my email this morning, as I begin my Lean Screen Week Challenge: "Keep Your Thumbs Still When I’m Talking to You".  New York Times writer David Carr reflects on the increasingly common tendency to pay more attention to our phones than we do to human interaction.

This analogy hit me particularly hard: Why is a person who keeps looking over your shoulder and all around the room while you're talking considered rude, while someone who constantly checks their phone is seen as being cool and connected?

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Being present for someone else means making eye-contact, paying attention to what's being said. It means thinking about and processing the conversation, not what's happening on my phone. But Carr raises an even more disturbing point:

"When someone you are trying to talk to ends up getting busy on a phone, the most natural response is not to scold, but to emulate," he wrote.

In other words, I'm not just being rude. I'm being a bad example.

Nothing, absolutely nothing I do is so earth-shatteringly important that I need to constantly check my email. I'm not an emergency room physician, I don't manage a nuclear power facility, I'm not the President of the United States.

So today, I'm going to take the email program off my phone for the week.

If you need me, call. (And remember to enter by commenting on this post.)


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