NET RESULTS/Karlin LilingtonNo recent electronic invention has posed more challenges to the writers of books on etiquette than the mobile phone. Mobiles even see off e-mail as a potential challenger.
Sure, e-mail causes social conundrums: is it acceptable to use e-mail as a communications medium to express condolences? Employment termination? Annoyance with government policies
For what it is worth, regardless of whether it is an acceptable medium for the latter situation, I can absolutely guarantee that e-mail most certainly is a useless and ineffectual medium for transmitting your praise/concerns/anger/queries to any member of government, since so few seem to read e-mail, and even fewer still actually respond to it. Of course, first you have to actually find a TD's e-mail address, no easy thing. There's no clear link from the Government's website to such an obvious convenience as a complete list of TD e-mail addresses, though there is a list of all the postal addresses for you to post your paper letter to you (welcome to the Republic, supposed leader in Europe in e-government innovation).
And then, just to confuse you further, if you try to guess at one TD's e-mail address from looking at someone else's, there's the changing format of TD e-mail. At one point, the standard was firstname.lastname@oireachtas.irlgov.ie, but now I have also seen underscores rather than a dot between first and last names. And suddenly too, the shorter oireachtas.ie has appeared on the other side of the @ sign.
Try either of these formats and the e-mails frequently bounce anyway. Certainly, no one replies to them. And on top of all that, some departmental websites don't even offer ministerial e-mail addresses (nary a one for the entire Department of Health, for example). So don't waste your time trying anything as cutting edge as an e-mail if you want to get the attention of a politician.
But back to the subject of mobile phones and etiquette. Etiquette wasn't initially an issue when mobiles clunked, in their then-dopey bricklike form, onto the scene in the 1980s.
The only people who could afford to have them were yuppies (remember yuppies?). Even then, not all yuppies had mobiles, so opportunities for being annoyed by them (either mobiles or yuppies) were infrequent, unless you hung out at places frequented by stockbrokers.
The rare people with the mobiles definitely tended to speak very loudly into their clumsy handsets. But we just figured they were trying to make sure we all knew that they had a mobile and were thus better off than the rest of us.
We could despise them in a satisfyingly general sense. We objected to their entire existence, not to the fact that they spoke very very loudly into their phones.
Fast forward to our brave new Millennium, and nearly everyone has a mobile, particularly in Europe.
Our knowledge of the social dynamics of mobile phone operation has expanded accordingly. We now know, through over a decade of keen observation, that ALL people speak too loudly into a mobile handset, regardless of income level or number of equity fund holdings. There doesn't seem to be much that can be done about this except to resort to reminder signs, now appearing with greater frequency in public places such as restaurants, offices and banks. Or you might try a strategically-aimed glare.
Yes, handsets are now ubiquitous. And some people use them ubiquitously. This is what gives rise to etiquette concerns. One's use of a mobile is immediate and public. Others don't always want to share the experience. Not while in church, for example. Or at a concert or play.
And there's a special circle of etiquette hell reserved for those who answer the mobile that you can hear ringing in the stall next to you in the Smallest Room. Ugh. Surely that call can wait, while one answers the call of nature? But no. Many seem happy to chat away to friends even from that tiled chamber, and despite its giveaway echo-effect.
Still, most of us would agree that such use is pushing the etiquette (as well as gross-out) envelope. More difficult to ascertain is where one draws the line regarding mobile conversations in cafes or restaurants or bars, or in shops or changing rooms or waiting rooms.
Europeans definitely have a higher tolerance for mobiles in some or all of these situations than Americans, probably due to the fact that mobile take-up has been slower across the water, and penetration is lower. Most Americans I know think using a mobile in restaurants, even discreetly, is incredibly rude, though to some extent this splits along generational lines.
Many Americans also find even the ringing of a mobile in such casual public situations highly annoying. In contrast, over here the majority seems not to be bothered by - or even particularly notice - the use of mobiles in eating places, as long as the conversation isn't intrusively loud.
I think most Europeans would be bemused by a long article in last Sunday's New York Times, entitled The Yakety-Yak Backlash, which examines such US frustrations. Give them another year or two, and they'll be as blasé as the rest of us.
I think we would all welcome a system of digitally blocking mobile usage in concert halls or theatres. It's hard to go to a public performance without having your willing suspension of disbelief suspended with a vengeance by someone's 1812 Overture ringtone.
In less infuriating situations, Europeans have clearly decided that a certain amount of ringtone intrusion is acceptable, as are low-key conversations that stay below the decibel level of a bassoon. Such determinations are the early signs that a proper mobile etiquette is beginning to take shape.
Don't expect any final determination of good mobile form to emerge anytime soon, though. As the Times article notes, it took decades for people to work out an etiquette for using telephones after their invention in the 19th century. Phone inventor Alexander Graham Bell refused to have one in his own study because he couldn't stand the jangle. Just imagine what he would have thought of a bleating Eminem ringtone.
klillington@irish-times.ie
Karlin's weblog: http://radio.weblogs.com/0103966/
