Writing in Inside Higher Ed, Scot McLemee proposes that people who use mobile phones in libraries should be shot with Taser guns, the pussy.
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They should be shot! I’ve experienced this nuisance myself on a couple of occasions over the last few weeks, whilst trying to write an essay for my Masters. As if spending a weekend with only library books for company wasn’t bad enough, to then have to listen to an interminable mobile phone conversation about the cost of a National Express coach ticket to Bath, whilst precious moments of limited library opening hours slip away…
To an extent it’s the fault of libraries themselves. In order to make themselves more ‘relevent’ to the ‘yoof’ many of the trendier ones have ditched the old fashioned ‘quiet please’ policy and filled themselves with computers and murals and encounter groups rather than books. Kids run around out of control, as they do everywhere else, and so people get the idea that anything goes. This drives away everyone who loves books and fails to attract anyone else, the computers are junk in three years flat and the library closes anyway.
People think that because they’re having a private conversation on their mobile they’re automatically in some private space when they do it. It’s why drivers pick their noses in cars. The fact that this fiction exists only in their heads is beyond them, they act the way dog owners do when their pooch is pooing in the park and they’ve no intention of picking it up.
Another irritant is that people actually talk much louder into mobile phones than they do when having a real conversation, presumably they think they have to shout because the other person is twenty miles away and they haven’t quite understood the whole microphone and microwave tower thing. It’s like they’re grandmothers in a play set in the 1920s.
There’s a battle here to create new standards in society, as technology evolves so must etiquette. The line must be held. These people must be told in no uncertain terms that mobile phones are unacceptable and they should be told to leave the library. Not just turn it off, but leave. After they’ve been shot by the taser of course.
I don’t have a mobile. I’ve never had a mobile. What did people do before they had mobiles (or the internet, let’s be fair here) to play with? Really? How did they survive without being able to bark their travel arrangements to their nearest and dearest on the bus for all and sundry to hear? How did people manage to walk down the street without texting? I think it just proves that the more sophisticated the communications device, the stupider the messages carried on them.