sry gotta bail mayb nxt tme
Though the 20-seat studio has a monthlong waiting list, he had set aside
two tickets for a friend. But now the friend was canceling just minutes
before going live. “It didn’t happen,” the friend wrote. “Dinner going
long.”
At 9 a.m. the other Monday, Paul Wilmot, a public relations executive in
New York, was meeting a colleague at Cafe Cluny in the West Village.
After he waited for a half-hour, an e-mail arrived from his breakfast
date, saying he was on his way.
Not long before that, Leandra Medine, the 23-year-old fashion blogger behind Man Repeller,
sat down at the SoHo restaurant Jack’s Wife Freda and waited for her
three friends. As she nursed a glass of wine, she glanced down at her
phone to learn, via text, that all of her friends had bailed.
Random missed connections? Not quite.
Texting and instant messaging make it easier to navigate our social
lives, but they are also turning us into ill-mannered flakes. Not long
ago, the only way to break a social engagement, outside of blowing off
someone completely, was to do it in person or on the phone. An effusive
apology was expected, or at least the appearance of contrition.
But now, when our fingers tap our way out of social obligations, the
barriers to canceling have been lowered. Not feeling up for going out?
Have better plans? Just type a note on the fly (“Sorry can’t make it
tonight”) and hit send.
And don’t worry about giving advance notice. The later, the better.
After all, bailing on dinner via text message doesn’t feel as
disrespectful as standing up someone, or as embarrassing.
New Yorkers with social-driven ambitions and hyper schedules seem to be
especially prone to this. And it is practically endemic among those in
their 20s and younger, who were raised in the age of instant chatter.
“Texting is lazy, and it encourages and promotes flakiness,” Mr. Cohen
said. “You’re not treating anything with any weight, and it turns us all
into 14-year-olds. We’re all 14-year-olds in suits and high heels.”
Not that he is above it, either. “I’m a victim of it, and I do it, too,” he said.
Digital flakiness seems to apply equally to last-minute plans and
engagements booked way in advance. Ashley Wick, the founder of Wick Communications,
a firm based in New York, organized an intimate dinner this fall to
introduce a designer she represents to about 10 editors. Invitations
were sent out two weeks earlier, but that afternoon almost half of the
confirmed attendees canceled via e-mail.
“Offline rules of etiquette no longer seem to apply,” Ms. Wick said.
“People hide behind e-mail or text messages to cancel appointments, or
do things that feel uncomfortable to do in person.”
The face-to-face consequences of being a flake have all but disappeared.
If the unpleasantness of having to disappoint a host or dinner date was
one reason commitments were honored in the past, technology has
rendered that moot.
“People don’t feel bad shooting someone a text to cancel, but no one
would ever pick up the phone and say, ‘Let’s have dinner next week
because I want to go to this party instead,’ ” said Danielle Snyder, 27,
a founder of the jewelry line Dannijo. “But when you say it out loud, you realize how bad it sounds.”
Adding to the guilt-free canceling is the assumption that we’re glued to
our smartphones, which means that people often wait to the last moment
to send regrets. “They’ll automatically think I’ve seen it because they
sent it,” said Jason Binn, the founder of DuJour magazine, who keeps his 139,000-plus Twitter followers
abreast of his celebrity tête-à-tête at Michael’s and elsewhere.
“People cancel meetings or change plans by shooting me a text, an
e-mail, even a tweet.”
Sociologists have coined a term for these freewheeling,
mobile-lubricated social interactions: micro-coordination. The term was
created by Richard Ling, a professor of communication at the IT University of Copenhagen.
Before cellphones, he said, people made plans based on prearranged times
and places, whereas now we can micro-coordinate, or adjust plans
according to real-time events, be it a traffic jam or a late night at
the office.
“The mobile phone has made that kind of coordination much more nuanced,”
Dr. Ling said. “We might have three or four different things going on
at once, and one thing might fall apart, or another thing might come
through, so there’s a basic indeterminacy we live with now.”
Micro-coordination is perhaps most evident among teens and
20-somethings, who grew up using instant messaging and texting for
everything, from homework to hooking up.
Rachel Libeskind, a 23-year-old artist who lives in TriBeCa, is
constantly navigating her social circles from her iPhone. She finds that
she’ll triple- or even quadruple-book plans on weekend nights, knowing
there’s only a 60 percent chance she’ll engage in any of them.
“People will text me, ‘Let’s do something this week,’ and I’ll have
three or four plans laid out for the week, and on average, more than
half of them fall through,” she said. “The social plans I make are
always changing, always shifting.”
Moreover, it’s not considered boorish when her peers abandon one
another. “Because there is very little at stake in terms of having these
plans, it’s not that rude,” she said. “It’s implicit because that’s how
everyone is operating.”
Older generations don’t understand, and often view such behavior as vulgar.
“My parents always say that when you make a plan, even if your finger is
falling off, even if you’re bleeding, you can’t stand people up,” said
Ms. Medine, the fashion blogger. “But to me, it’s not rude. If your
plans fall through, that’s fine. We live in a city where there are a
million other plans waiting for you.”
Ms. Medine added that she would often R.S.V.P. to five events a night,
knowing there’s little chance she would attend them all. “I don’t think
any plan is a plan until you’re inside the restaurant looking at someone
else,” she said.
While it may offend etiquette experts, micro-coordination does offer
certain benefits. “Most people celebrate the ability to change plans or
fluidly manage plans,” said Scott Campbell,
an associate professor of communication studies at the University of
Michigan, who specializes in mobile technology. “We don’t have to pick a
place, or even a time. We can just make it happen in real time. Lots of
folks get excited by that.”
Julie Macklowe, 34, could be called a fashionable micro-coordinator. A founder of vbeauté,
a skin care line, and fixture on the New York social circuit, Ms.
Macklowe regards her e-mail and texting devices as lifesavers.
“How many hours did I waste in high school and college waiting for a
call to happen, or find myself at a restaurant that was the wrong place,
only to have no ability to find out where to go, so instead I’d just go
home and be disappointed,” Ms. Macklowe said.
The fashion designer Cynthia Rowley said that her mobile-enabled social
life has allowed her to expand friendships “without having to put in the
face time.”
Cindi Leive, editor in chief of Glamour magazine, recalled a
pre-smartphone incident in her early days as an editor, when a publicist
kept her waiting at a restaurant for 40 minutes. “Would I have been
happier to have received a warning text? Definitely,” Ms. Leive said. “I
think flakiness is part of your DNA.”
Even old-school sticklers for protocol relish the freedom that
micro-coordination provides. Mr. Wilmot, the publicist, may not
appreciate a last-minute cancellation via text, but he does make plans
that way.
“With texting, you don’t have to go through a whole salutation like on
the phone,” he said. “My rule is, when it comes to making plans
electronically, you can make ’em, but you can’t break ’em.”
For the writer Derek Blasberg, there is one glaring downside to being a tech-enabled flake:
“If you text a friend that you can’t make dinner because you’re feeling
sick, and then a picture of you dancing on a bar shows up on someone’s
Instagram feed, you just got caught,” Mr. Blasberg said. “With the rise
of social media and technology, it’s harder to use little white lies to
get out of things.”
Credit : NY Times
. 
While I developed an unhealthy addiction to 'Solipskier' and ignored friends and family to watch all four seasons of 'Battlestar Galatica' in an embarrassingly short amount of time, a bare-bones service is my top find of the year. 
Kanye West launched G.O.O.D Friday, Robyn released 'Body Talk' on the go, and even Gorillaz created an album on the iPad before unleashing it on world for free. Three or four years ago, the music industry was atrophying and anemic, getting walloped by piracy and Pandora both. But now artists (along with creative, interactive marketing plans) are breathing new life into an industry that was forced, violently, to reinvent itself. People are beginning to pay money for experiences, but are also (rightfully) expecting something free. RCRD LBL encourages album hype by letting listeners download singles without pay. Call me idealistic, but it seems like musicians realized that they are artists and were lucky to be commanding the attention of the world, which led to experimentation (like Robyn producing an album on tour, or Girl Talk crashing his own servers by offering a free record). G.O.O.D Friday, which was West's way of releasing a set of songs each Friday to his devoted Twitter followers, stirred the hype of his blockbuster 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.' Is the music industry perfect? Hell no. But visionaries are finding ways to make money and garner acclaim -- and consumers are glad to pay, as long as they are paying for something worthwhile.
Fine, I'll say it: the iPad is the best tech of 2010. Listen, the Internet is going to kill the printed page no matter what -- 
Technically, I suppose, it all started in 2009. In November of last year, I gave up on cable. I moved into a new apartment and left the shackles of subscription-based television behind -- and I couldn't have picked a better year. In 2010, streaming media finally went mainstream. 
The "downloadable games revolution" that has for so long been promised finally arrived for real in 2010. The absolute flood of quality titles ran across all platforms: From gems like 'Solipskier' on iPhone and Android, to the spectacular 'LIMBO' on Xbox Live Arcade, to PC games big ('Mass Effect 2') and small ('Super Meat Boy') on the Steam download service, there's been simply more instantly-accessible gaming available in 2010 than could be played by a single pair of hands. The wild success of games like 'Angry Birds' has served to drive the point home: Even big publishers like EA and Activision have redoubled their investments in the downloadable games space, and such high-profile titles as 'Rage' and 'Infinity Blade' (from top PC developers iD and Epic) have upped the ante on mobiles. Expect big things in 2011.
Among the magical buzzwords that regularly pollute our conversations and sully communications, "app" is certainly at the top of the list. And yet, to my mind, that hype is only going to increase in the coming years -- and rightly so, as others fully discover (like I did this year) that there really is an app for everything. My morning ritual of checking e-mail, calendar appointments, industry news, general news, gossip sites, whatever -- it's all quickly, cleanly and neatly done via apps. Sure, they've been around a few years already (and many years in the form of desktop widgets), but the App Revolution is for real. Along with touch-based interfaces, it represents one of the most exciting user interface paradigm switches (buzzzz!) for computing since the introduction of the mouse. Finally, the Web works the way I want it to, and I'm not looking back.
I was really buying into those Verizon iPhone rumors around March when I decided to hold out on renewing with Verizon, in hopes I could snatch a new iPhone when I re-upped with the carrier. With no iPhone in sight, though, I skipped waiting, stayed on Verizon and chose Android instead. With my trusty Droid Incredible in hand, I was ready to do everything that a person bestowed with an iPhone could do -- buy apps, launch angry birds, check e-mail and tweet. But I had one huge advantage: the operating system running on my phone was open source. In 2010, it is this reason alone that Android phones have grown to hold 25-percent of the worldwide market share of smartphones. The flexibility of Android opened up a huge market for hardware manufacturers, such as HTC, allowing them to build a solid fleet of phones that individually have worked better for certain groups of people. If 2010 was a growth year for Android, expect 2011 to only be more full of little green robots and sweet-inspired (Gingerbread, anyone?) OS updates.
