[telecom] Mayoral Candidates Wedded to Smartphones While Campaigning

Kiss Baby, Smile, Check Phone (Over and Over)

Mayoral Candidates Wedded to Smartphones While Campaigning

By SARAH MASLIN NIR September 6, 2013

John C. Liu clutched his cellphone in both hands, tapping with his thumbs, while John A. Catsimatidis hammered out a message on his own phone.

Farther down a long table, Joseph J. Lhota shuffled two phones before him like a deck of cards. William C. Thompson Jr. squinted at the BlackBerry in his palm.

Bill de Blasio did not seem to notice their behavior - he was looking toward his knee, where one of his own phones was balanced.

New York City's race for mayor this year has featured a number of conspicuous novelties: a white front-runner who has won considerable black support, in part by highlighting his biracial family; a contender with two beloved shelter dogs who is routinely harangued by animal rights activists; a candidate whose habit of sending sexually explicit messages to women he never met led this week to a screaming match with a heckler in a bakery.

Less conspicuous, perhaps only because voters are too busy staring at their own smartphones to notice, is the way the ubiquity of mobile devices has introduced a new peril into candidate-voter interactions: distracted campaigning.

At a forum last month, typical of the scores of such events around the city over the course of the campaign, candidates fiddled ceaselessly with their phones, though they were onstage before an audience of over 1,500 and the event was televised.

The phenomenon is in part a fact of contemporary life - people everywhere check their cellphones constantly - and in part a tacit acknowledgment of a reality of campaigning: It can be boring to listen to the same rival candidates saying the same things day after day, night after night.

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