Face time

Have you had this experience lately? You’re talking to someone, say across a table at a restaurant, but they’re not looking at you during the conversation: they’re texting while talking. They’re texting while listening. Or they’re checking their e-mail messages. They mutter affirmative statements periodically to indicate that they are, in fact, listening to you. But they’re not all there, somehow.

Does this not feel incredibly rude to you?

Now, this may seem bad enough when it’s a stranger, or a casual acquaintance, or even a friend or family member. Worse if it’s a loved one who neglects to make eye contact when you’re “communicating.”

There’s something wrong with communication these days. It used to involve two people — or more — having a face-to-face exchange of words or ideas. It involved eye contact. Body language. Our gadgets — our precious smart phones — have erected a barrier between us. We’re never “all there.”

Whatever happened to face time?

Dilbert got it right. In a recent comic strip, he tells Dogbert he’s found two prospects on an Internet dating site. “One’s a Facebook addict,” says Dilbert, “and one’s addicted to prescription pain meds.” Sounds like a tie, Dogbert says. “But only one is likely to make eye contact,” notes Dilbert.

Guess which one?

Not just mealtimes but every sphere of our social interaction now is likely to involve the intrusion of an uninvited guest: the iPhone, the BlackBerry, the Galaxy. These “guests” don’t pay the bills or leave a tip; they’re naggingly self-centered, pinging contantly, and drawing what used to be independent adults into their web of “Me, me, me.”

Does this sound exaggerated? If a child at a dinner table kept nudging you every 30 seconds, tugging at your sleeve while you’re trying to converse, you’d probably tell the kid to chill out. Stop bugging Mommy or Daddy. Eat your vegetables. Yet we shamelessly indulge our little gadgets, coo at them fondly, thumb them lovingly. They never learn discipline.

Anyone ever hear of tough love?

Our attention these days is generally scattered, fragmented to begin with. It extends beyond the gadgets. Sometimes when you’re talking to someone (or maybe it’s just me), you can see their eyes involuntarily flit past your shoulder, glide around the perimeter. They’re scanning the room, looking for the next Widget or link to click, one imagines. Somehow, we’re not used to concentrating on one input, one task at a time anymore.

The pundits will say this is due to the general decline of reading. That’s partly true. Reading involves focused concentration; a great deal of linear thought is required to scan lines, decipher characters, use imagination to put the pieces together. Back in the ‘80s, people said that video was going to replace reading: we were all becoming more visually oriented because of video games.

That was wishful thinking. Nowadays we’ve gone way beyond one screen, one video at a time; now we’re used to three or four visual stimuli at once; we complain if our smart phones don’t shift instantly from task to task, dissing the millisecond delay when calling up several apps or pages at once. Technology has conditioned us to expect more, faster, clearer presentation. We will accept nothing less.

So no wonder sitting and taking with people face to face can seem so archaic, so much like a chore. Faces don’t change much, do they?

But of course they do. Faces change constantly, conveying so much emotion and nonverbal information. Yet we’re learning to tune out that type of information, perhaps learning not to trust face time as much as we once did.

Getting back to the texter at the dinner table. After holding a five-minute conversation that involved zero eye contact, I decided to fight fire with fire. I continued conversing, but I slyly pulled out my own phone and began padding my own keys, meanwhile still talking, in a distracted kind of way, trying to convey how rude I felt such behavior was.

The person’s eyes did manage to flicker up for about a millisecond, noticing my new activity; but then they dropped back down to the device in hand. We resumed talking. There, but not there.

I might as well be conversing with Siri. At least she seems to pay attention.