I think her lack of response to him is meant to suggest that she doesn't even hear him, she's so engaged with her device.
Which sums up perfectly the real issue (IMO) behind articles like this: Anxiety (particularly men's anxiety) about being able to get what one wants or needs from other people (particularly women) when every five minutes there are more new things to pay attention to.
I'm 52 and have a certain set of expectations about what's polite in the attention-giving department. (And I have the perspective to know that I can change my expectations if I want to.) I would assume that a 32-year-old and a 12-year-old would each have completely different expectations, and a sense that their expectations were/should be the norm.
Since I can remember an era when there were far fewer attention-demanding devices, I can conceive of a world in which people don't need to be texting or emailing or facebooking all the time. Hence I can choose not to engage with these things or buy these devices. (I'm fortunate in that I don't have to have these things for work.) If I had kids, I would try to teach them about that choice, not that it would likely change the way they see things, especially given the lure of advertising and the force of peer pressure.
no subject
Which sums up perfectly the real issue (IMO) behind articles like this: Anxiety (particularly men's anxiety) about being able to get what one wants or needs from other people (particularly women) when every five minutes there are more new things to pay attention to.
I'm 52 and have a certain set of expectations about what's polite in the attention-giving department. (And I have the perspective to know that I can change my expectations if I want to.) I would assume that a 32-year-old and a 12-year-old would each have completely different expectations, and a sense that their expectations were/should be the norm.
Since I can remember an era when there were far fewer attention-demanding devices, I can conceive of a world in which people don't need to be texting or emailing or facebooking all the time. Hence I can choose not to engage with these things or buy these devices. (I'm fortunate in that I don't have to have these things for work.) If I had kids, I would try to teach them about that choice, not that it would likely change the way they see things, especially given the lure of advertising and the force of peer pressure.
In other news, Obvious Malkin is obvious.