Mobiles rule the world – of rudeness (From The Northern Echo)

Mobiles rule the world – of rudeness

11:12am Tuesday 16th February 2010 in

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SPITTING in the street used to be the sign of public rudeness, but personal communications gadgets are now the preferred means of universal discourtesy.

Someone calls in for a cup of coffee and a chat and, as soon as his phone goes off, he turns away from you and answers it. This is the technological version of butting in when someone else is speaking.

Meetings are vile. A general discussion is going on, but half the committee are staring into some personal gadget or other. A whole generation has been infantilised by the new gadgetry. Shoals of people can hardly set off on a trip to the loo without setting the satnav.

Transport is a nightmare as we have to endure the sound of people living out their banal and nauseating private lives in public – even in the silent coach on the train.

The gadget freaks seem to suppose that the very up-to-dateness and shininess of their childish gadgets – “cool” is what they call them – somehow excuses perpetual rudeness in their operation. Concerts and plays are ruined by crass interruptions, and the babyish noises given off by these cybertoys indicates very well the mental age of their users.

The other week I took a funeral in the crematorium and we had three jingles inside half an hour. The damned gadgets are downright dangerous, as people stop suddenly in the street to answer them – and trip you up.

My most outrageous experience by a long chalk was in the short service of Holy Communion which I put on at lunchtimes for City workers. I was in the sanctuary preparing to administer the Sacrament.

A young woman approached the altar rail when her phone rang. She knelt down, held out her hand for the wafer, and with the other hand put the phone to her ear and began a conversation. I said: “Turn that thing off!” It was only the fact that I was in the holy of holies which prevented me from saying something much more colourful.

It gets worse. A priest has just moved into one of the City churches – a man, I think, who would be more at home in a pantomime than a pulpit. The occasion was Plough Monday, back in January. In the Middle Ages this was the day when the priest blessed the plough and prayed for the success of the crops which the farmer was preparing to sow.

In the City of London, the Plough Monday service is a ceremonial occasion in the presence of the Lord Mayor and the Sheriffs. This new priest, this clown, this extraordinary self-publicist, had thought up a tremendous wheeze: he got the City workers in the congregation to hold up their phones and Black- Berries for him to bless.

Of course, he had arranged for all the press and the broadcasting media to be there to ensure maximum exposure. It is written: “My house shall be called the house of prayer, but ye have turned it into a den of morons.”

In any case, these phones are not “mobile”.

Something mobile is something that moves around under its own steam. They should be called – as, I believe, they are actually called in France – “portable”.

I concede that if you’re lost in a snowstorm on Ilkley Moor, a portable phone is a godsend.

But, in practice, they are rarely used for emergencies – usually for people to talk a relentless tide of drivel and inconsequentiality.

It is a form of social degeneration when electronic noises take precedence over human company and polite conversation.

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.