As I write this blog I’m sitting in a Metro Detroit airport Northwest World Club lounge. Once again I’m reminded that cell phone technology has removed all semblance of privacy, quiet reflection, or personal space. Another traveler and I have been sitting in an alcove of the lounge, removed from the ever present CNN monitors and other noise-producers, reading our papers and working on our laptops. I’ve enjoyed my few moments of respite between planes, and he seems to have enjoyed his. Then a woman chose a chair near us. Not two minutes later she begins talking on her cell phone “at the top of her lungs,” as my Grandmother used to say, as if the other two of us do not exist.

I don’t mind the occasional interruption, nor do I think “my space” is inviolable in otherwise public areas. And I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeon. But I’ve got to say that cell phone ethics simply don’t exist. People talk anywhere near anyone in anyway they please. The rest of us are supposed to think “It’s a free country,” shrug, and put up with it. By the way, moving to another location doesn’t help. All the other locations are already taken by terminal cell phone users.

Even if you could find a space where no cell phones are in use it will be dominated by ubiquitous monitors proclaiming “the news”—around the clock. You can’t even sleep in the airport between red-eye flights without the white noise of talking heads.

So, where does one go to read a book? Remember that? Reading. Where can you go to simply sit, drink your coffee, and think in a quiet public atmosphere?

I recommend cell phone-free zones, like public spaces now reserved for smokers. If you really need a smoke, you can generally find a place in bus terminals and airports where you can smoke behind walls in a space set aside for you. Why not establish libraries or reading rooms or simply “Quiet Areas” for those who want to unplug?

Northwest World Club tries—one alcove in the club is labeled “Quiet Zone” with a lined-out circled cell phone. But a television monitor still plays on the wall in the alcove and travelers still sit and talk loudly. Apparently “quiet” only refers to cell phones.

All this makes me appreciate country clubs where many of them have outlawed cell phone use in the dining areas and on the golf course. At least there’s one place one can still get away from cell phones. Maybe I’ll take my book and read on the second tee.

© Rex M. Rogers - All Rights Reserved, 2006

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