Alone Together: What I Think

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be “Alone Together” because the meme I created for class tries to answer this question. I think being alone together is an acceptable behavior in some scenarios. Like yesterday me and my friend, Karmann, went to the gym to get do out triweekly workout. I noticed, as we moved from machine to machine, that most of the people in the gym ignored each other, creating an atmosphere where they were together in the room, yet alone, because they distanced themselves by shoving headphones into their ears. Apparently the gym is one place where people can be on their phones without judgement because it’s universally accepted that you have to listen to music when you work out.

This observation lead me to thinking of times when it’s acceptable to be this way. It’s acceptable to be on your phone if you’re alone on a bus, or alone walking down the street, or alone in the library studying, or even when you’re eating lunch alone. But usually it’s only accepted when the person on the phone is alone (when their friends aren’t there to talk to them). It’s just weird to me that our society is fine with the use of cellphones in public places, as long as the person using them doesn’t have friends to talk to.

Because if there are friends to keep conversation going, and then someone pulls out a phone, bystanders judge whoever pulled out the phone in the middle of the conversation. Yet those same bystanders judging the person for taking their phone out in the middle of conversation, could just as easily go talk to that person if they were alone, and using their phone in an acceptable way. Maybe if we didn’t have such an acceptance with the use of phones when alone, then we wouldn’t have a problem with cellphones to begin with.