George Packer has a chat with his roofer about why he’s so irritable these days. It’s not the recession, it turns out:
It turned out that cell phones had become a major headache in his work. Customers called him all the time, expecting him to hear every little complaint even while he was wrestling with a roof hatch. Meanwhile, they were more and more unreliable, not answering their phones, missing scheduled appointments.
….“It’s the technology,” the roofer said. “They don’t know how to deal with a human being. They stand there with that text shrug” — he hunched his shoulders, bent his head down, moved from side to side, looking anywhere but at me — “and they go, ‘Ah, ah, um, um,’ and they just mumble. They can’t talk any more.” This inadequacy with physical space and direct interaction was an affliction of the educated, he said — “the more educated, the worse.”
….This was a completely new phenomenon in the roofer’s world: a mass upper class that was so immersed in symbolic and digital cerebration that it had become incapable of carrying out the most ordinary functions — had become, in effect, like small children with Asperger’s symptoms. It was a ruling class that, out of sheer over-civilization, was quickly losing the ability to hold onto its power.
WTF? These folks call constantly on their cell phones, so it’s not that they’ve lost the ability to carry on a verbal conversation. It’s just that they can’t do it face-to-face. Do I have that right?
Is anyone else skeptical about this? Obviously I have zero experience with 20-something metrosexuals in New York City, but, seriously? Is this happening? More anecdotes, please.
