Question.3246 - FOR 10 POINTS POSSIBLE…READ THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE AND ANSWER THE QUESTIONS AFTER THE ARTICLE. PLEASE TYPE AT LEAST ½ PAGE, SINGLE SPACED, WITH YOUR ANSWERS(check out the extra credit after this article).“Got That Virtual Glow?: Texting, tweeting render users ‘present yet absent’”Fran Stover sent out an electronic “It’s a boy!” birth announcement, complete with picture, when she upgraded to a burgundy Black Jack II from Samsung in March. She nicknamed ‘him’ Jack. When she knew she wouldn’t have access to him for a spell, she worried about hurting his feelings and wondered if she should hire a babysitter. Lucy Hackman flew to Bermuda last month for a wedding. On her way to the hotel, she fixed her attention not on the miles of ocean outside her taxi window, but on the tiny window of her BlackBerry. Megan Renz, who typically sends around 700 texts a day, including rapid-fire sessions when she’s at the park with her 4-year-old son, Landon, curbed her online habit slightly during a Hawaiian vacation in May, when she jumped on her computer for only four hours a day. For fun. Restaurant meals, family outings and holiday gatherings—not to mention movie dates, birthday parties and even baby showers—used to be about enjoying the moment of, say, a shared joke, a knowing glance or a sip of cold beer over a sunset. Now, thanks to technology, those moments are multi-tasked to the minute, to the point where even the digitally addicted admit they’re so burrowed into their virtual lives they sometimes miss out on the real thing. Cell phone cameras have replaced cigarette lighters as the concert torch of choice. Sure, scads of sequined gloves were dug out of closets, but Michael Jackson’s memorial was remarkable more as a mass Face Book status update: 800,000 were posted during the two-hour tribute. For the July 15 premiere of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, actually attending the event was only half the goal, it seemed, as Hogwarts-dressed teens texted “wish you were here”-style postcards to those who weren’t. And remember when then- presidential candidate Barack Obama was caught checking his BlackBerry during one of Malia’s soccer games last summer—and was roundly reprimanded by Michelle, with a hand slap, for doing so? It makes one wonder: Who will be around to watch the grass grow? “We’re so entrenched in what we’re doing” – in the palm of our hand or in the canal of our ear—“that we’re not paying attention to the outside world,” says Ray Soto, 30, who has run into walls because his head is bowed into his iPhone. Technology’s tether is “terrible,” says Renz, 24, of Hilton, NY. “I have a life and job and family, and I’m still on the thing,” a Pantech Slate, her 10 th or so smart phone since 2006. We’re all increasingly on them: A report released last year from M:Metrics, a mobile-media research firm, found that Americans browsed the Web an average of 4.6 hours a month from their smart phones, an 89% increase from 2007. A May study from consulting firm Gravitytank found that app-enabled phone owners spend an average of two hours a day on their devices, with nearly 40% of that time dedicated to app use. By2013, smart phones will have doubled their share of the handset market, accounting for 20% of all cell phones, according to market research company In-Stat. Of course, the safety risks linked to gadgets-on-the-go are well-documented: Last week, the Senate introduced legislation that aims to extend the ban on texting while driving. Even thumbing while on foot has its hazards: Last month, a texting teen tumbled down an uncovered manhole in Staten Island, NY (she escaped serious injury). But, it’s the cultural consequences of shunning the corporeal moment in favor of the virtual one that are murkier. Dan Rasmus, director of business insights at Microsoft and co-author of Listening to the Future: Why It’s Everybody’s Business, calls one effect digital autism: When you’re engrossed in the digital world, you’re more disconnected from the social and physical world. In particular, it’s the so-called “virtuals,” those born after 1999, who need watching. “They have parents and elder siblings behaving in a different way, so what are they learning about what’s the right way to behave?” Technology results in what psychologist Kenneth Gergen, a senior research professor at Swarthmore College, calls “absent presence”--others are present, via a virtual connective thread, even though they’re physically absent. It works the other way, too: You’re at dinner, for example, and your partner disappears from the present moment by thumbing away under the tablecloth. Frequent diner Sam Fiere, whose public relations company represents two dozen restaurants in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas, instructs his staff to stow their smart phones when they’re at client restaurants, in part to set a good example for patrons: “I’d like my clients to know that we’re not obnoxious unlike many other diners these days.” That “green or blue glow” of a table-parked smart phone is emerging as the “Subversive factor” in dining, says Frank Klein, a restaurant owner and consultant based in San Francisco and Boston. In the early part of the decade, traditional phone booths begat restaurant cell phone booths. Now, maybe it’s time to have a twitter or text booths.” When someone’s eyes drift to an iPhone midsentence—when they are present but absent—Firer is known to swivel his chair so his back faces the speaker. “They’re doing the same thing, in essence.” What worries Gergen is when “the environment itself, that living world upon which our creatureliness is based, is separated from us,” distanced through a glowing screen. Without sensual engagement with their surroundings, people are becoming “post-human,” Gergen says, “more a part of their machine world than their biological world.” Some companies are acknowledging this latest incarnation of the man-vs.-machine struggle with a wink. Consider that Corona beer’s-eye-view-of-paradise ad, in which someone skips stones, and then his cell phone, into a lagoon after the phone starts buzzing. Or that Verizon/ESPN MV ad in which a woman being feted at a baby shower watches college hoops highlights on her cell instead of oohing and aahing over her little-girl gifts. If we’re interrupting our silver screen time with LED screen time, there’s a social significance. In the past, waiting for a movie to start or an elevator to descend meant “you had a bit of forced downtime,” says Patricia Wallace, head of online programs at John Hopkins’ Center for Talented Youth and the author of The Psychology of the Internet. “It let you gather your wits or stare at the (floor) numbers. You were relieving your cognitive load”—you were engaging in forced relaxation. “Now you can suck up all those little slots of time and pour something into them, whether it’s work or social, because you have a gadget.”Digital devotees see the shift. “I do think there’s something to say about how we’re not living in the moment and stopping to smell the roses,” says New Yorker Karen Robinovitz, co-founder and creator of the beauty brand Purple Lab. “But I think the roses are different now: They’re virtual Facebook gifts,” icons you send your Face Book friends as tokens of appreciation. Robinovitz has started mashing together her online and in-person lives every month through tweet-ups, during which she and 1- to 15 similarly style-obsessed women gather to Twitter and, yes, talk between sips of lychee martinis. Robinovitz is the kind of person who, while heading to Sunday brunch with her husband, will tweet that very fact, which doesn’t exactly thrill her better half. “He’s like, ‘C’mon, I want to spend time with you, not you on Twitter.’” So a couple of weeks ago, she put down her BlackBerry and, with her husband, strolled along the High Line, a new park in Manhattan built atop an old elevated train track. For an hour, she wasn’t distracted by anything but the wildflower décor and rooftop views. “There was something incredibly refreshing about it.” Somebody recently asked Robinovitz what achievement she was most proud of. She may have launched a lip gloss line in May, “and yet I was most proud of walking on the High Line and not Twittering.” QUESTIONS TO ANSWER FROM “VIRTUAL GLOW” (type answers): 1. Do you think there’s a danger of being a ‘virtual’ human rather than a real one due to the amount of virtual ‘living’ one has access to? 2. What does ‘absent presence’ mean to you? Does it describe you in any way? 3. Comment on this quote: What worries Gergen is when “the environment itself, that living world upon which our creatureliness is based, is separated from us,” distanced through a glowing screen. Without sensual engagement with their surroundings, people are becoming “post-human,” Gergen says, “more a part of their machine world than their biological world.” Do you agree or disagree and why? ????????????????????????????????????????????????????And now for 5 pts. possible extra credit, read the article below and answer ONE question atthe endMy P’Intresting’ addiction (Observer Nov. 2012)Our obsessions with smart phones are causing us to make dumb mistakesMy name is Chanet Stevenson, and I am an app-aholic. I would do that thing where I state how long it has been since I last played on my phone, but truth be told, I have been texting, checking twitter and pinning adorable craft ideas to my Pinterest boards while sitting here typing this story. I have a serious problem. Up until recently, though, I had never realized just how much unnecessary time I spend messing around on my phone. I mean, if having a professor catch me pinning Easter decoration ideas last week wasn’t embarrassing enough, then I would definitely be even more mortified if anyone was to look up at how many games of word warp I have played.The biggest reality check, however, came when I was hanging out with a friend. While she was talking to me I caught myself repeating the question, “What? I’m sorry, what did you say?” It was then that I finally realized just how serious the situation was. While my mind had been lost in Facebook World I had literally not heard anything she had said. I had been so rude and felt terrible about it. I quickly apologized and put my phone away. Perhaps another example that I’m sure many people can relate to, is how I tend to nervously check my phone to avoid awkward situations. This mainly happens whenever I am alone in public, meaning that even though there are tons of other people around, I don’t know any of them, so I instead pull my phone out of my pocket and proceed to dink around on it so as not to look like a complete loner. Sadly, though, this is just a small fraction of the excuses I could come up with as to why I am always on my phone. In coming to realize this about myself, I have since been working to break this bad habit of mine. To do so, I decided to try out the whole “out of sight, out of mind” concept, where I will purposely leave my phone in another room or in my backpack if I’m in class or doing homework. So far, this experiment has been successful, since it makes it more of a chore for me to have put down everything I am working on to get up and go find my phone. However the downside to this is that I have also consequently lost my phone a few times. Okay so it’s not a perfect plan, but hey, it is a start to recovery. In short, my point of this story is to encourage anyone who, like me has a difficult time putting their cell phone down, to PUT THE CELL PHONE DOWN. Start by looking for the signs that you have a problem. If you are paying more attention to your phone than to what is going on in class you might be an app-aholic – or bored, which is also a cause for app-aholism. If you have zero recollection of the last conversation you had, but can recall the last tweet you read, then you might be an app-aholic. If you run into stationary objects while walking and looking at your phone, then you are definitely an app-aholic. I could go on but I hope by now you get the point. It is important to remember that the Facebook and Twitter conversations aren’t going anywhere. You can read them later. So don’t let your friends walk away while you’re too busy not paying attention to them with your nose pointed at your phone. And if you want to avoid being embarrassed in class when you get called by the professor to answer a question you weren’t paying attention to, consider putting your phone away to lower the temptation to play on it. Don’t be that stupid person who annoyed their friends and let their grades slip because you were too dumb about using your smartphone. FOR 5 POSSIBLE EXTRA CREDIT PTS., ANSWER THIS: ARE YOU AN APP-AHOLIC? EXPLAIN YOUR ANSWER.

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