Letter from America
In New York, self-obsession has replaced human conversation
‘The music is too loud,’ I said to a woman at a party in a rooftop bar in Manhattan.
A time-tunnel moment. This had been a familiar old-fart complaint when I was young, which was when rock and roll were young also, and the snarky comeback would be ‘If the music’s too loud, you’re too old.’ Except now the music was too loud. ‘We must speak in broken sentences,’ the woman agreed. She was in her early thirties, tops. This was at the Jane Hotel in Greenwich Village, but the music would be purposefully too loud in such venues all over New York.
Why? If you’re there, you get it right away. People who have lost conversational skills need to surf a wave of sound.
It’s not just chat that’s gone but manners generally. Here I may seem to be recycling traditional grumpiness about how badly the younger generation is behaving – except it’s not only the young who have shed their manners and I’m not whingeing about changes, which I often relish.
Manners haven’t been replaced by deliberate rudeness. They are simply no longer much practised; they have become Unmanners. In New York and London both.
I have just been to London for the first time in five years and found the changes there particularly striking. OK, some specifics: screens, cyclists and the spreading culture of narcissism.
Screen people – I call the extreme cases ‘scrunchies’ because they have become screen food – are far more numerous in Manhattan than in London and they are folk who have clearly given up on any need and/or desire for human contact.
You see scrunchies seated across from each other at restaurant tables, eyes on their screens. I just saw one glued to his screen, his back to the singer in a small club. You’re not a human presence if you sit next to a scrunchy on an aeroplane. A scrunchy-frequented coffee house has the icy vibe of an addiction clinic.
I was intrigued to read that Roedean, the top-shelf girls’ school, was sending their sixth-formers away for a week to a Wi-fi-less country house because the headmaster felt they should get to know one another personally, not by way of Instagram and Whatsapp.
So, cyclists. Is anybody going to argue with me on this? Instead of keeping to the rules of other wheeled vehicles, they assume pedestrian privileges, hurtling headlong through lights and around corners, often on the pavements, apparently immune from police interference until they maim or kill.
New York and London cyclists are alike in this but differ in other respects. The New Yorkers travel singly and their unreadable faces suggest origins in an ancient culture – Mayan, say.
The Londoners, meanwhile, travel in posses, which often include helmeted, blonde women, and there’s something about them that signals don’t mess with us.
‘I honked at one,’ said my friend Melissa Dant, when she was driving her artist husband, Adam, and me through Shoreditch. ‘He caught up with me and spat on my window.’ Which happened to be closed.
The numb self-centredness of Unmanners is generated not just by smartphone screens, though. Smartphones also transmit sound, and this lends itself to a raw narcissism, which I have found more rampant in New York.
Once, only the deranged talked loudly in the street or a public place. Now there’s an epidemic of people bellowing to a companion on a device. I recently tried to hush one who was irritating even the scrunchies with his monologue. He looked stunned.
‘This is a Starbucks,’ he roared. ‘Go to a library.’
The smartphone’s photographic capacity is another element. Yes – selfies. It’s exceedingly hard to enjoy a walkabout in, say, a museum if everything you want to look at is being mobbed by smirking selfie-takers. There was a piece in the London
Times in May by Emily Clarkson (Jeremy Clarkson’s daughter), a 24-year-old self-proclaimed narcisssist, who defined herself as a member of ‘Generation selfie, Generation social media, Generation -259 – because that’s how many people have died trying to take the perfect photo of themselves’. That count may now be higher.
Unmanners may have been born of our devices but they have become rooted in the real world. Occasionally I had to ask my way in London – it had been five years – and usually got a reaction of utterly wordless bafflement, as though I were speaking Hittite.
New York neighbours seem to have taken to just ignoring one another blankly. If you open a door for somebody, don’t count on a ‘Thank you’. A scrunchy treads on your shoe and you can’t rely on a ‘Sorry’.
Our social glue is being dissolved by antisocial media. The other day, I had a casual exchange with somebody on the street, followed by a smile and a wave.
I was surprised how good it made me feel.