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- Talking on the phone is the worst—can you blame these guys for texting?
A man of a certain age confides:
What brought on my query was a passage in the New Yorker review of a new movie, Men, Women & Children, whose theme, says critic David Denby, is that “our obsession with screens and devices has erased our ability to get to know one another.” Denby—who shares this concern—offers a moment from his private life: “A parent I know, grounding his teen-age daughter, took away her texting privileges for a week but allowed her to use the house landline. ‘You can call your boyfriend on the phone,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t know what to say to him,’ she protested.”
I would never have called him to ask that. And I had nothing else to say to him. E-mail was a complete godsend.
When we see buses full of teenagers texting furiously, do those of us who judge them with sadness or contempt stop to think that all are engaged in the vital art of human communication? Which isn’t easy and never has been. A few years ago I got a call completely out of the blue from a girl I’d last seen on the front steps of the sorority house I’d walked her to the night we graduated from college. I was tongue-tied then—but, by God, if we’d only been into texting she’d have had a completely different idea of the stuff I was made of. When she called I was just as tongue-tied. Why did she call? Why didn’t she find me on Facebook?
