Let's play a game

[dsrtao]

called "we're not listening to your cellphone conversation on the bus".

The conversation is remarkably reminiscent of soap opera plots, though. Do you suppose that overindulgence in same has affected people's behavior?

Comments

[cellio]

Whether it has affected people's tendencies to end up in such plots I can't say, but it seems pretty likely that it has affected people's willingness to talk openly about them when they do.

[marysdress.livejournal.com]

I think that Facebook and Twitter and cell phones are actually to blame. Soap operas have been around since before television, but people didn't use to talk about those kind of life events out loud where people could hear about them. They talked about them on their nice land line at home or in person.

(And btw, I think soap operas are more reflective of life than life influenced by them. Soaps are a little like orange juice concentrate - all the thin watery bits taken out so it's smaller and more intense with just the pulpy bits left. The cell phone conversation was just the pulpy bits...)

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Maybe. Some 7 years ago a woman who I just met started telling me personal details about her health which might have been iffy even if I'd been her sister, and that was before FB/Tw and so on.

My opinion is that people aren't paying attention to where they are when they are on their cell phone, and they aren't really paying attention to the trajectory of their own lives, which is why they end up sounding like soap operas.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Whip out *your* cell phone, and try to come up with a plot interesting enough that people stop pretending not to listen to her, and start pretending not to listen to you instead...