Why People Yell to Their Cell Phones
Almost everyone has a cell phone these days, and with the great advantages of cell phones also comes responsibility. It is certainly good and bad cell phone etiquette, and unfortunately, poor cell phone etiquette is still widespread in the general population.
An excellent example of the tag cell phone is bad people yelling into their cell phones. Have you ever noticed how people speak much louder in the mobile phone than a regular phone? It is very common, and can be extremely annoying to those nearby. Many people will apologize in another room when making a call, but there are times when you can not leave. For example, when riding in a car with someone, you may need to take a call, and there is no “another room” you can go. It is times like these when cell phone etiquette is of utmost importance.
So why do people with normal volumes about screaming in their cell phones? It’s a pretty simple explanation, actually. Domestic fixed phones have a microphone in the receiver that amplifies your voice in the earpiece. When you speak into a phone, your voice is captured and replayed through the ear piece, so you hear your own voice loud and clear. It is very similar to how a radio DJ wearing a helmet, then speaks into a microphone and hears his own voice in the headphones. With cell phones, your voice is amplified through the earpiece, so the only noise you hear is from your mouth. Seem like it would not be a huge difference, but the volume level of words coming from your mouth into the air and the ear is a big enough difference from the sounds of a speaker phone that is pressed directly against your ear.
Cell phones are very common in society, but relatively speaking, they are still fairly new. Unless you are a teenager, you probably grew up at a time when domestic phones were the norm, and so you are subconsciously trained to act as if every phone works like a telephone households. It is therefore not surprising that when most of us made the jump from a landline to cell phones, we conducted more than a lot of our habits. Now we hear our own voice much softer than while speaking into our cell phones, and the natural reaction is to speak.
It is important to avoid this tendency in situations where you try to be polite. Remember, people want to hear you scream in a cell phone almost as much as you hear them screaming into a cell phone. So keep in mind that, while talking on a cell phone, simply use your voice steady, as if the person was standing right next to you.
Perhaps one day the cell phone companies will decide to integrate the voice-amplification technology in cell phones that were commonly used in fixed lines. But it probably will not happen. Cell phones are here to stay, so we all need to adapt and begin to practice proper etiquette cell phone.
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