I still think Nancy was a moron and the guns-don't-kill-people argument is too simplistic, but each have a germ of truth: at some point, a human being has to take at least a sliver of responsibility for him/herself instead of blaming it 100% on the inanimate object in front of us.
The gun analogy falls apart quickly though. If a gun is fired at me, I don't get to choose whether or not I'm going to take a bullet. Email, cell phones, tweets and such do give me a choice: I can receive/acknowledge/read at the time & place of my choosing, or not at all.
If my phone rings, I make a choice: answer it, ignore it, let it rollover to voice-mail, turn it off. If I didn't want the damned thing in the first place, I'd wouldn't buy one. If I didn't want calls just at that moment I'd turn it off. Pretending I'm powerless over the demands of a cell phone and blaming cell phone technology for that sense of powerlessness & failure of society isn't a sane option.
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Date: 2010-08-25 09:00 pm (UTC)The gun analogy falls apart quickly though. If a gun is fired at me, I don't get to choose whether or not I'm going to take a bullet. Email, cell phones, tweets and such do give me a choice: I can receive/acknowledge/read at the time & place of my choosing, or not at all.
If my phone rings, I make a choice: answer it, ignore it, let it rollover to voice-mail, turn it off. If I didn't want the damned thing in the first place, I'd wouldn't buy one. If I didn't want calls just at that moment I'd turn it off. Pretending I'm powerless over the demands of a cell phone and blaming cell phone technology for that sense of powerlessness & failure of society isn't a sane option.