A Lucent Technologies engineer powers up his Palm Pilot to play games during a company lecture. At upscale Spago restaurant in Palo Alto, a food fight nearly erupts when one patron complains loudly about eight cell phones ding-dinging around him. A San Francisco 49ers cheerleader is abandoned by her date so he can answer his beeping pager.
The world of etiquette is in chaos. As technology becomes more personal, a debate rages: Should digital devices be permitted to change widely accepted customs of human engagement?
It’s Old Manners vs. New Manners.
A cease-fire seems unlikely. Today, more than 75 million Americans use cell phones.
“There is a whole host of technology waiting in the wings that will help us probe new frontiers in bad etiquette,” said Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future, in Menlo Park.
In one corner are those whose modems are virtual umbilical cords.
“They don’t understand that concept of wanting to be connected,” said Ryan Hollitz, 26, Stanford Law School’s Web master. “I feel almost disconnected when I’m not connected to my computer.”
“The rules of etiquette need to embrace technology,” maintained Susan Hauff, 31, a program manager at Cisco Systems who won’t leave home without her cell, palmtop, pager and laptop.
You don’t use your fork to fling food at people and you don’t interrupt polite conversation to take a call from your stockbroker, argue others. .
“I call them the McManners generation,” complained Naomi Torre Poulson, the 50ish director of the Etiquette School of Palo Alto. “They are technologically astute. But they are etiquettely challenged.”
And they are blurring private and public space. “People wouldn’t dream of bringing a typewriter to a restaurant,” she said. “But people think nothing of taking their phone to a restaurant and conducting business. Business is private. Breaking up with your husband or wife is private. It shouldn’t be laundered in public.”
Getting upset about someone using a cell phone in a restaurant is an “odd personal hang-up,” said Manuel Perez, founder of Mimio, a Boston-based company that transmits an instructor’s oral comments and written notes over the Internet.
No, it is about defending the republic against tech-device toting rubes, say the politeness police.
Restaurants, theaters, museums, doctors’ offices — they’re all banning the electronic gadgets. (“We still get renegades,” observed Ryan Nicola, a buser at popular Moose’s in San Francisco, which recently placed cards on each table asking diners not to cell chat. “Some people turn them on and leave them on the table to taunt us.”)
The list of e-offenses increases daily: cell-phone conversations in public restroom stalls before, during and after flushing. Tinny electronic chirping during funeral services and visitations, a few feet from the deceased.
Tech insanity strikes other special moments, too. Melanie Pike, a 21-year-old De Anza College student and 49ers cheerleader, watched in disbelief as a date schlepped away to secretly answer his pager at a restaurant.
“He said, `Hold on, I have to go to the bathroom,’ and then he called,” she recalled. “Like I didn’t know? There will be no next time.”
This, though, is a wireless new world.
“In an open forum, if they can’t keep my attention, I’ll go somewhere else,” said Russ Gribble, 30, a tech support engineer at Lucent. .
“If my Palm Pilot is dead, I’ll go to my cell phone and scroll through my index,” Gribble said.
