We are in the middle of the peak of Christmas dinners with friends, co-workers and family. And we still have Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. In addition to those people, the drinks and the ham, there is one more guest: your cell phone.
One of the last covers of the magazine The New Yorkerwhich has gone very viral, is a work by artist Chris Ware where you can see a family gathered at a Thanksgiving dinner, where everyone looks at their cell phone.
The article talks about how we are creating memories today, with thousands of mundane photos and videos stored on our phones.
That cover is a perfect representation of how we behave today.
It has always been said that at family gatherings it is rude to pay attention to things other than the celebration itself. That is to say, taking out your cell phone in the middle of a dinner may seem rude or even seen as rude.
We have been living with the cell phone for decades and today it is not that it is a tool, it is that it has become another member of our body. Our society has changed so much to adapt to the hyperconnectivityit’s time to make something clear: it is not rude to take out your cell phone in the middle of a Christmas dinner.
I’m sorry, but checking a social network for the latest thing your contacts have posted isn’t rude, it’s probably more interesting than the conversation they’re having next door. Many times one does it without realizing it or simply because they leave their cell phone next to the cutlery and we tend to hold it when we are not eating. It has become a reflex, like crouching when you see something headed for your head or changing direction when you see your boss coming down the hallway.
You can’t curse your cell phone for behavior that some people believe is antisocial when you do exactly the same thing when there is a television screen nearby.
It must be recognized that the attention and concentration capacity has been reduced and that screen is needed to be able to continue with dinner.
Forward! Take dozens of photos of the food, look at your phone to see the latest congratulations from your WhatsApp contacts or whatever you want. The same goes for your cousin—the one you haven’t seen since before the start of the pandemic—she has written you a funny “copy and paste” message that she found online. Or, why not, check Instagram to see how happy people are and the perfection of the Christmas tables of your contacts, who although they are going to eat with their family, have prepared a table as if the ambassador were coming to dinner.
Of course, there are limits to these behaviors. For example, never play a video with the volume on while you are with other guests. Don’t have your phone in sound mode either, because what kind of person has a phone with sound about to start 2024?
Society has changed a lot since we always have smartphones in our hands, so have the social rules by which we usually live. If you really want people to have interesting conversations at a dinner, let them know before you sit down and ask them to please refrain from using their cell phones. But of course, prepare a good battalion of ideas to converse and keep your diners entertained. You are competing with millions of other people by posting things that are probably much more interesting than your latest anecdote at work.
