Nevertheless, in the absence of a context conmion sense forces us to conclude either that the sentences really deal with four separate actions and four separate characters, or that they are a very badly told narrative. | 10. Afterwards he reflected upon what had happened. His wife could wait he thought but the phone rang with the authority of Mussolini in a bad mood. Most of us probably have had this experience. We have been making a purchase when the phone rang and the clerk dropped us cold and got into a long conversation on the phone. Or perhaps we had a visitor in our office and interrupted the conversation to pick up the phone. Whatever is happening the telephone comes first. 11. What is it about these things that makes us so obedient and so oblivious to that which lies outside them such as actual people I once asked a man who was bellowing into a cell phone in the coffee shop in San Francisco why he was talking so loudly. A bad connection he said. It had not crossed his mind that anything else mattered at that moment. Like computers and television cell phones pull people into their own psychological polar field and the pull is strong. I have watched people complete a conversation start to put the thing away and then freeze. They sit staring at it as though trying to think of someone else to call. The phone is there. It demands to be used almost the way a cigarette demands to be smoked. Does the person own the cell phone or is it the other way around 12. And what does that suggest about where this communication revolution is taking us When I was in Hong Kong a year and a half ago it was becoming a cell phone hell. The official statistics said that there was one phone for every two people but it often felt like two for one. They were everywhere at a table with four people two or three might be talking on the phone. You d see a couple on a date and one was talking on the phone. 13. There is something lonely about a wired world a world in which only personal desires are all that matters and to hell with everything else. And everything else starts to go to hell. So I ll just close with a prediction. Noise is going to become a bigger issue in the next decade than smoke was in the .
