Not many things in life can be more irritating: you are having a conversation with friends, but they check their phones and begin replying to texts or checking their emails. The Guardian   described the scene of a friend's face buried in a screen as "a distinct 21st-century problem". A new word has been created to describe this --- phubbing. It is the act of looking at your mobile phone instead of paying attention to others during a social interaction. Like pointing at one's nose, phubbing is widely considered rude behavior. People everywhere are beginning to lose patience with the phenomenon. A "Stop Phubbing" campaign group has been started in Australia and at least five others have sprung up in its wake as anger about the lack of manners grows. The campaign's creator, Alex Haigh, 23, from Melbourne, said, "A group of friends and I were chatting when someone raised how annoying being ignored by people on mobiles was." He has created a website where companies can download posters to discourage phubbing. Phubbing is just one symptom of our increasing dependence on mobile phones and the Internet, which is replacing normal social interaction. A survey found that one out of three Britons would answer the phone in a restaurant and 19% said they would while being served in a shop. The survey came after a supermarket assistant in south London refused to serve a woman until she stopped using her phone. A poll, for a Sunday paper, also found that 54 percent of people checked Facebook, Twitter or other social media every day, with 16 per cent checking more than ten times a day. An unsurprising 63 per cent of people carry their phone with them "almost all, or all of the time", it found. Phil Reed, a professor of psychology at Swansea University who has studied the Internet addiction disorder, said many phubbers show symptoms of addiction to their mobile phones. Time magazine once pointed out, "Phubbing has a much greater potential harm to real-life connections by making people around us feel like we care more about posts than their presence." In the UK, Glamour magazine even imagined how novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817) would have written about people with bad mobile phone manners: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man or woman in possession of a good mobile phone must be in want of manners." Which of the statements is TRUE about the "Stop Phubbing" campaign?
It was first started in America and then it spread to Melbourne. Companies can update posters against phubbing on the website. Alex Haigh, 23, was the first one to find phubbing annoying. Up till now, at least six groups have claimed to support it.