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We've spent generations filling our every waking moment with more forced broadcast stimuli, I don't blame 'millennials' for wanting to put up a minimum filter and default to their own bubble of controlled media. Why should we talk if you don't have something more interesting to say than my phone?

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There are things of value to be learned even in media that doesn't immediately grab and hold your attention. Sometimes learning things requires focus. In fact, probably most things worth learning don't jump out and grab you, but require some effort to keep your attention on them.

If you always optimize your attention towards whatever is most immediately compelling, you'll wake up one day and find out you don't really know anything.

Why can't the immediately compelling be something that you have been focusing on for years?

You don't know whether or not I have something more interesting to say if you're dividing your attention between me and your phone.

As the article says, it takes more than 30 second to divine whether or not a conversation is going to go somewhere interesting, and if you stop paying attention at the drop of a hat, it never has a chance.

> it takes more than 30 second to divine whether or not a conversation is going to go somewhere interesting

I think that's an older-generation thing. If you go 30 seconds without getting to the point, of course people will think that you don't have one.

And must all conversation have a point that is deliberated at the origin? A lot of the most useful and salient conversations I've had with friends, colleagues, and mentors in my life have been ideation, thinking out loud, stepping through an experience or an impression... there wasn't a clear point, until two hours later, when there suddenly was. Or, there was a point, one thought, and it changed course during the conversation.

I don't know where I'd be without those conversations.

> Why should we talk if you don't have something more interesting to say than my phone?

I don't think that valuing relationships by how useful they are to you "right at this moment" is a very good way to go about life.

Well, but maybe on the other side of the phone there is another person, relationship with whom I value more? It's not like smartphones are all (or even mostly) about status updates.

Then excuse yourself and handle your business in private.

That's what I'd do if you weren't interrupting and pressing me for face-to-face conversation. Also, it's you who invaded my space, so why don't you go somewhere else?

The point is - in my opinion, it's equally rude to pull out a smartphone in the middle of a face-to-face conversation, as is to approach someone "fiddling with their phone" and expect undivided attention.

Exactly this. Some people seem to think that using smartphone means doing something irrelevant, less important than talking to a person. But you know what? On the other side of that phone there usually is a person.

One of the rudest behavior I encounter is people suddenly coming to you and interrupting in the middle of your IM conversation, demanding undivided attention and refusing to accept that you're in the middle of a conversation. IM is not e-mail, it's often as time-sensitive as voice, and quite often that IM conversation is much more important than whatever the interrupter came with.

Because relationships matter and your phone won't care for you when you are sick.

Or help you move your couch and belongings to a new place.

There's an app for that.

Or help you move a body.

Out of all other examples this is probably the only one that makes sense - and only because talking about murder over Internet is very poor OPSEC.

Wouldn't surprise me to learn there's an app for that, too, though it might be an unofficial .apk.

The person I'm messaging will.

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