Annette Clancy joins Lisa Haneberg in bemoaning the practice of taking mobile phone calls in the middle of conversations with real people.
Sometimes our sense of self is reliant on external sources. Being “available” is one way of feeling better about ourselves and in turn convincing ourselves that we really “matter”. The 24/7 thing with phones/blackberries is also a way of saying we are available to everyone all of the time which in turns means – to no one body most of the time. The relentless availability culture is in my opinion a charade that is an avoidance of “intimacy”.
Makes sense to me, and reminds me that I wanted to make a related point about presentation “tools”.
I suppose presentations has the same linguistic roots at the word presence but I wonder if our presentation tools, like Powerpoint, tend to reduce our actual presence. I used Powerpoint this week for the first time in ages and I now wish I hadn’t. The next speaker did without and I think as a result he was much more available to the audience than I was.
