Quiz on social correctness:

Is this right, is this wrong?

1. Cellphone rings in restaurant. You answer it.
2. You’re talking to your pal and the cellphone rings. You pause in your talk and check to see who is calling.
3. You’re at home, the phone rings, you wait to see who it is and if you feel like talking to him/her.

If you read the NYTMagazine article on the evolution of connectedness, maybe you’ll have given a fleeting thought to your own standards of what is passable behavior. The author considers the following trends in the ways we attempt to connect to others:

In fact, it’s now considered rude not to have some sort of machine to take messages for you. And not only have we become used to machines that take messages, we also sometimes prefer them to live communications…

Between cellphones, email and instant messaging, it’s now considered exotic to be truly unreachable at all.

The article suggests that in making decisions about answering, checking the caller’s ID, etc, you are making a series of instant status judgments. You flip open your cellphone for some, not for others.

It says something about me that I am constantly being preempted by a cell call. It could be that I am boring. It could be that people even get coconspirators to dial their number, just so they could have a respite from our exchange. At less paranoid times, I have concluded that I appear so completely benign and informal that the world out there has determined that I cannot easily be offended by such behaviors. Or at least that I wont kill the perpetrator.

Okay, I’ll confess: I wont kill, but I do hate the whole imposition of pseudo-connectedness on human interaction. You’re hanging at home – pick up the darn phone. You’re out and about, hanging with someone, trash or silence your cell, or at the very least, ignore the precious Ode to Joy when it sounds in your pocket. Bach would have wanted it that way.