“Is talking to a phone the same as talking on it?,” Nick Wingfield asks for The New York Times.
“The sound of someone gabbing on a cellphone is part of the soundtrack of daily life, and most of us have learned when to be quiet — there is no talking in ‘quiet cars’ on trains, for example,” Wingfield reports. “But the etiquette of talking to a phone — more precisely, to a ‘virtual assistant’ like Apple’s Siri, in the new iPhone 4S — has not yet evolved. And eavesdroppers are becoming annoyed.”
Another irritant in listening to people talk to their phones is the awareness that most everything you can do with voice commands can also be done silently. Billy Brooks, 43, was standing in line at the service department of a car dealership in Los Angeles recently, when a woman broke the silence of the room by dictating a text message into her iPhone. ‘You’re unnecessarily annoying others at that point by not just typing out your message,’ said Mr. Brooks, a visual effects artist in the film industry, adding that the woman’s behavior was ‘just ridiculous and kind of sad.'”
MacDailyNews Take: They’re just pissed they don’t have Siri. Yet. 😉 It’s like this with all new tech as begins to hit the general public. It was like this with automobiles, the first cellphones, and with PDAs.
“People who study the behavior of cellphone users believe the awkwardness of hearing people in hotels, airports and cafes treating their phones like administrative assistants will simply fade over time,” Wingfield reports. “‘We’ll see an evolution of that initial irritation with it, to a New Yorker cartoon making fun of it, and then after a while it will largely be accepted by most people,’ said Mr. Katz from Rutgers. But, he predicted, ‘there will be a small minority of traditionalists who yearn for the good old days when people just texted in public.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If you use Siri in public places, what are some reactions you’ve noticed?
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Whit D.” for the heads up.]
