But until he is replaced by a machine, I think he should be treated as a person, with all the rights of a person. I said that we all know that the job that the man at the checkout counter was doing can now be done by a machine. I answered the question from the floor in a very different spirit. But I found myself disagreeing with them. And I’ve never considered myself a nostalgic person. I was not older than my fellow panelists. If we hadn’t spoken to them, I always assumed they would have been upset as well.
If they hadn’t spoken to us, we would have been upset. I thought of growing up and all the years I went shopping with my grandmother, all the relationships she had with the tradespeople at every store: the baker, the fishmonger, the fruit man, the grocery man, for this is how we called them. She had a right to her privacy as he provided his service. Each said a version of the same thing: The man who did the checkout had a job to do. I just want to be on my phone, into my texts and Facebook.
But the guy at the checkout line, he wants to talk. “Actually,” she confessed, “the only time I have is at night, after I’m off work and before I go home, when I go family shopping at Trader Joe’s. Then came this question from the floor: A woman said that as a working mother she had very little time to talk to her friends, to e-mail, to text, to keep up. But e-mail can get so engrossing that you’ve got to be careful you’re playing with fire!) (Your daughter looks up from her star turn at lacrosse, and you are deep into an e-mail to your supervisor. Don’t bring your laptop to your children’s sporting events, no matter how tempting. And then there was me, there, I suppose to represent the cyberworld and where it might take us.Īs I remember it, we responded to questions from the moderator and from the floor with general agreement on most matters: No texting at family dinner. On the stage was a moderator, a Globe reporter, and two of the Globe’s regular “advice and manners” columnists.
In November 2011, The Boston Globe had a panel on “cyberetiquette.” We met in a theater at Boston Globe headquarters.
0 kommentar(er)
