The second half of Baron's "A Better Pencil" brought up a theme that seems very important in today's society. That sounds kind of lofty, "in today's society, this problem permeates our lives..." but when I stop to think about my own progress with technology, it is at times difficult to separate myself from the problem – let alone the awareness that it exists as a new problem, foreign to my parents generation. Sometimes technologies cause issues in aspects of life that were unrelated to the original aspect addressed by its design.
For example, E-Mail was designed to afford us many new abilities that snail mail could not: instant delivery, irrelevance of geographic location, affordability to acquire and send. Schools, businesses, friends all use email to communicate with an audience that can now be larger and farther away. However, this affordance creates the unique problems of spam messages that make our important messages difficult to find, suspicion about the identity of senders, and the subtraction of important cues that we can normally perceive in person (such as body language, tone, volume). As a society, we are coping with these etiquette problems together.
In the same vein, when is it socially acceptable to text in public? What kind of messages are we sending to the people around us when we walk and text, text while we stand in line for food, text under our desks in class? Among the people in my age group, for the most part, it has become acceptable to text and talk at the same time (depending on the conversation subject matter, frequency of text interruptions, etc.). I assume these rules of etiquette will transform continually as our technology becomes an increasingly large part of our daily lives. Not to sound lofty or anything.
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