When we are angry though, why are we angry? Certainly, sometimes our friends’ rudeness hurts our feelings; we don’t like being made to feel as though we are not important to the people we care about. But there’s something about control going on here, too. We want our friends to be able to control the urge to look at the phone. We want our friends themselves to be bound by our expectations of what listening and paying attention look like. More strikingly, those who have employees or kids want to exercise dominance over their underlings at the office, and over their children at home. When employees or kids fail to perform deference by seeming to listen quietly, it is insubordination; they reject not just their attentional obligations, but also the authority of their supervisors and parents. It may look like thumbs on a screen, but in truth it’s a middle finger raised straight in the face of power. These are recalcitrant workers, and recalcitrant daughters, engaged in micro-sociological acts of rebellion.

Perhaps sometimes people who ignore physically co-present conversation are just being rude, but—as demonstrated in two out of the three Facebook Home ads—sometimes rudeness is also resistance. When we view smartphone users as present and taking action instead of merely absent, these acts of resistance become more apparent. The bored developer rejects Mark Zuckerberg’s demands that he perform emotional labor at work and appear to be interested and engaged when he is not; he thwarts Zuckerberg’s power that keeps him sitting in that chair. The bored daughter rejects gendered expectations that she perform emotional labor at home by appearing to be a caring “good listener” when she is not; she thwarts the parental power that keeps her sitting at the table. And when I spend my drink-wait staring determinedly at my phone rather than re-acknowledge the guy who keeps touching my arm and laying artless pickup lines on me, I am rejecting his masculine entitlement to my body, my attention, and my time. In my own small way, in a way less violent than the imaginary bar fight in my head, I am thwarting the power of patriarchy. I’m not absent but present, and pissed off on top of it; my friends who are present with me through digital conversation are providing welcome support and diversion.

Here’s the other thing: We were attention-shifting before there were smartphones, and we attention-shift even when our smartphones are still in our pockets. I’ll own the fact that sometimes I don’t pay full attention when people talk to me: sometimes I accidentally space out, sometimes I have a lot on my mind, sometimes I’m too sleep-deprived to focus on much of anything, and sometimes—yes—I’m making the choice to deliberately tune out and wait for someone to please just stop talking. A smartphone in my hand may make it more glaringly (glowingly?) apparent to the person speaking that I’m not giving them my full attention, but I don’t need the smartphone in my hand to create the possibility of inattention. If we view smartphone use as “absence,” it’s too easy to see non-use automatically as presence; yet, we all know the frustration of talking to someone who’s distracted, even without a smartphone in their hand. We shouldn’t kid ourselves that we have someone’s attention just because the thumbs are still and the eyes are pointed in our general direction.

via Rudeness as Resistance: Presence, Power, and Those Facebook Home Ads » Cyborgology.