I guess this is just because I’m of a different generation but this remark seems very odd to me:
I didn’t even check for free wifi at my aunts church, I have to assume that if you expect your parishioners to stay in church that long you HAVE to give them free wifi right?
WiFi in church? She’s joking, right? It seems to me that churches would want to make sure that there was NO WiFi or cell phone service in the church. If you go to church you’re supposed to be going for reasons other than texting and updating Facebook. On the other hand, maybe they think young people wouldn’t go to church if they have to be disconnected from the rest of the world for an hour or two. Still, I think it’s a little bit sad that there might soon be no place in the world where you can go and be truly isolated.
Actually, there is a place like that. Unfortunately, it’s my house.
June 24th, 2010 - 9:53 am
Wow, and here I keep threatening to build Faraday cages and get those mythical WiFi disruptors for my classrooms…I guess I’ve joined the “get off my lawn” brigade.
Actually, I LIKE not being reachable by cell phone and such. Though that may be because most of the people who bother to call me up are going to be asking me to do something for them.
June 24th, 2010 - 10:02 pm
Agreed. Church is not the place for whyfie or Failbook. I mean, just– just– words fail me.
Also how rude — “I don’t know these people I just got dragged along by my husband so I’m going to ignore the goings on and text somebody” or whatever she was trying to do. Geez lady if you didn’t want to go to the wedding you shouldn’t have freakin’ gone.
I guess words didn’t fail me after all.
June 25th, 2010 - 6:24 am
Maybe it’s not a “generational” thing so much as an “I am entitled!” thing.
If I had an SO, and he was invited to a wedding where I knew no one, I’d go along. I’d sit there and “participate.” I wouldn’t gripe, I wouldn’t try to text people. Because I’d hope, if I were the one up there in the foofy dress, that the people sitting out in the pews weren’t trying to figure out ways to technologically check out.
It’s called the Golden Rule. It’s been around a long, long time. It’s NOT time to discard it now.
June 25th, 2010 - 7:51 am
I wonder if technology makes people feel more entitled. Everything is so easy, so instantaneous. Waiting for an appropriate time is not part of the modern experience. I don’t know… I love technology myself. I own a cell phone but it hasn’t made me feel like I should be able to use it everywhere, all the time.
June 25th, 2010 - 9:25 am
I think there is something to that. I seem to remember a comic doing a monologue (except it was more of a “hmmm,” type monologue than a laugh-out-loud one) about how in the early days of the Internet, if a page took a couple minutes to load, that was just fine, but now, if it doesn’t load INSTANTLY people actually get angry.
One of my colleagues takes long field-trip (like, week plus with camping) classes in the summer. He says that for some of his students, when they get out of cell-phone range (which they do; they go to pretty remote places) they start to actually twitch – it’s like withdrawal symptoms. And he had one woman get very angry with him because she couldn’t call her husband (a “just to talk”) call. Because, “you didn’t TELL us we were going to be out of phone range!”
He also said that once, when they stopped for a lunch break on low mountaintop, and one person discovered they had “bars,” suddenly EVERYONE pulled out the cell phones and started calling, it was like people had been deprived for too long.
This is someone who has gone backwoods camping specifically so he can be out of range of distractions like that, so he found it particularly inexplicable.
June 25th, 2010 - 10:25 am
I must be of the same generation because I find it hard to believe that at a time when people are still being actively persecuted for their religious beliefs, this person is complaining about the lack of free wifi?
Then, of course, there’s the whole Golden Rule thing mentioned above.
June 25th, 2010 - 3:07 pm
The more you have the more you expect, I guess.