News Regarding the Center
Four Score and ... Mind if I Take This?
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New York Times, Week in Review
September 30, 2007
WHEN Rudy Giuliani, smack in the middle of a recent speech before the National Rifle Association, stopped his talk and said that he was taking a call from his wife, Judith, it could be that he really had forgotten to shut off his handset.
Or he might have orchestrated the call, as some critics are saying, to lighten his image. Or it might have been an attempt to lower the tension in a room where Mr. Giuliani, a Republican presidential candidate, was not universally loved, given his antigun stance while New York City's mayor.
Whatever the facts, for some it was a threshold moment-- not about politics, but about cellphones.
Are Americans so comfortable with cellphone intrusions that it is now acceptable to take a call, even in front of a hall of people? Or was the criticism that followed Mr. Giuliani's public love chat a sign that Americans have had it with cellphones and with the people who will take or make a call, no matter the setting? "Did he cross a line?" asked Naomi S. Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University and author of the forthcoming book, "Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World." "That presumes there is a line."
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In Sweden, people think little about talking on their phones while riding a bus or train. But in Japan, phones have a "manner mode" button that disables the ringer, Ms. Baron said, and bus and train riders are encouraged to use it. (Swedes, she said, are also comfortable talking in public restrooms, but that seems to be less tolerated elsewhere.)
People in Finland are not big on face-to-face chitchat, yet they freely yak away on their cellphones, said James Katz, the director of the Center for Mobile Communications Studies at Rutgers University.
In China, almost anything goes when it comes to cellphones, but in the Philippines text messages are the preferred means of communicating.
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