[media-credit name=”Carlos Magana, Staff” align=”alignright” width=”300″][/media-credit]In this digital age we log-in, upload, update, check-in, re-blog and tweet to a world that does not care. Smart phones are making us act dumb.

Proper etiquette dictates that we put phones away during conversations.

Curt Fletcher of eHow scolded serial phone users in his article “Social Etiquette.”

“If you are at work, in a meeting or in a conversation with another person, turn the ringer off your phone and don’t answer it,” he wrote. “Interrupting another conversation to answer your phone is not only rude but it makes the other person feel less important.”

Dr. Leslie Haddon had predicted the rudeness of “Generation Text” back in 2000 with her essay “The Social Consequences of Mobile Telephony.” She suggested we put our phones away and warned about creating our own private spaces in public.

“Internet users being on-line and interacting with distant others may reduce interaction with those immediately around them, such as family,” she wrote.

Pulling out a cell phone in the middle of class is an insult to the professor and rude to classmates. Accessing social media outlets to express boredom demonstrates a lack of social etiquette and only makes the user look uneducated and disrespectful. Why sit through a class only to update a Facebook page?

We use social media to fend off boredom (which we embrace much too easily) and to distract us from real-life obligations.

“(Mobile phones) serve to cut us off from those immediately around us and indeed using a mobile telephony can also be used to give a message to others concerning the user’s non-availability to those physically present,” Haddon wrote.

Forget homework, laundry and showering because our wall posts and our blogs need updating. We must step away from the bright screen, throw our phones down and take a step outside. The sun is shining.

Social networking networking has great potential and it is unbearable to see it wasted. Websites like YouTube have allowed many amateur entertainers to support themselves through advertisements. Facebook helps families stay in contact. Twitter can bring awareness to injustice and revolutions.

Twitter was used by Egyptian protestors to show the world their disgust with Hosni Mubarak.

Students, who will one day become professionals, can use social media so much more effectively. Instead of using Twitter and Facebook to say how much we hate being at work, students can use it to begin building their futures. Student musicians, writers and entertainers can use social media to their advantage and promote their work.

Students who spend their walking-to-class time with their heads down trying to take in life through a small screen are missing out on what our campus has to offer. Worse, students who spend their class time on their phones are wasting a great education that legions excluded from college would love to have. They are wasting a valuable seat and professors should not have to teach in an environment that is more concerned about Kim Kardashian’s newest 140-character tweet than what a professor is saying. They are wasting their money, their parents’ money or worse, the taxpayer’s money.

Too many have become blind to surroundings but up-to-the-minute on their virtual lives.

Much time is wasted updating to a virtual world that does not care. Self worth is being determined by the number of likes and followers. As a generation, organic friendship and authentic conversation is dying. If it is not hash-tagged then it seems like it is not a conversation worth having.

Our primary way to interact has devolved through these digital tombs that confine us to ourselves. We have reached the objectification of immortality by being forever virtually alive. There is little use for a legend showing how bored we were in class or how un-entertained we were by our own mundane lives.