A Quasi-Argument for Bringing Your Cellphone to the Bathroom

The first week of journalism school, we were told to make professional twitter accounts for ourselves, something that used our real names and where we sent out clean, work related quips only. Then we were told to follow ten news organizations.

I have that "professional" twitter account but it has maybe four followers and eight tweets overall.

Instead I use another account where I feel I have the most control over my voice and presence. Like a good journalism student, I follow several news organizations on that account as well. Like a terrible journalism student, I rarely read past the headlines.

I have never categorized myself as a "news junkie." I have however, always been an "information junkie." While I don't know a lot of details about the stock market or the current talks with Iran, I know a lot about the lies behind the Thanksgiving origin story and how often, radical feminism is fronted by white feminism and how that's damaging.

This doesn't make me bad at what I do; this probably just makes me a bad candidate for The New York Times and that's okay with me. I do however, realize that I need to change the way I look at the news and the way I interact with it.

I was on a week-long road trip with my best friend when the Germanwings crash story broke. He got a text notification from WFSB, a Hartford, Connecticut based news channel. It said something about a plane crash in the French Alps.

We were spending roughly 20 hours a day in a car, trying to make it to 16 states in seven days so I had plenty of time to surf the internet. The amazing thing was, almost anywhere we went, I had either 4G or 3G and therefore, access to the internet. So I found myself watching this story develop just because I was on twitter constantly. I was reading about the international safety protocols that existed that allowed this to happen. I learned how exactly cockpit door security worked. I studied individual profiles of the victims onboard.

And when I can back to school, I was able to teach something to my journalism class because I had followed one particular story so closely.

So when I say, it's totally cool to be checking your phone while you're in the bathroom, it's not really. It's still pretty gross when you think about it but that doesn't mean some of us are going to stop doing it. The same goes for checking our phones while we're on the train or when we're grocery shopping.

It doesn't mean that we're disconnected. It may just mean that we're ready to teach something brand new to you.