LAST summer a German businessman became one of Europe's first victims of mobile-phone rage. He infuriated fellow drinkers in a Hamburg beer garden by refusing to turn his mobile phone off; a fight broke out and the compulsive communicator was clubbed to death with a beer bottle. “It was really loud,” one witness told the police, “and had one of those terrible melodies too.”

Clubbing somebody to death is a little extreme. But there is no doubt that mobile phones have taken their place among the world's great irritations. Their biggest sin is to have introduced telephone conversations into places that have previously been free of them, blurring the boundary between public and private life. Try reading a book on a train these days, for example, and you are invariably interrupted by some mobile bore telling the airwaves that he is on a train. Mobile phones have become a hazard even in the theatre. “Tell them we're busy,” the actor Kevin Spacey told the owner of a ringing mobile during a London performance of “The Iceman Cometh”.

Mobile phones are at once alienating and intrusive. They encourage people to abstract themselves from their immediate environment, interacting with unseen interlocutors instead. And they force everyone else to listen to one half of a (frequently inane) conversation. This is made worse by the two iron laws of telephony. The first is that a phone call invariably trumps face-to-face interaction, so that even polite people will abandon a conversation to answer a phone. The second is that mobile-phone conversations know only one mode: fortissimo.

What can be done? London clubs forbid the use of mobile phones except in special phone booths. Gordon Ramsay, an acclaimed British chef and owner of a London restaurant bearing his name, asks his customers to leave their phones at the front desk, though he will take calls for them if necessary. In Switzerland, the railways have set aside special cars for unrepentant telecommunicators. In Japan, the bullet trains have signs instructing people to use their phones in the corridor “even if it is inconvenient”. The Hampton Jitney, a bus that shuttles New York's gilded elite from the city to Long Island, limits passengers to three minutes on their cellphones. If they go on for longer, tempers soon flare. And the state of Ohio has a law forbidding the use of mobile phones while “pursuing, shooting, killing, following after or on the trail of, lying in wait for, or wounding wild animals while using a hunting or trapping implement such as a firearm or a bow.”

Technology is also coming to the rescue of cellphone haters. NetLine Technologies, an Israeli company, is selling a device called a C-Guard, which disables mobile phones by using low-level radio signals to block communications between handsets and their base stations. The device is apparently perfect for concert halls, theatres and churches. MAZ Hamburg, a German engineering company, has invented a Mobifinder, which can locate mobile phones within a 50-metre range to help enforce bans in places such as hospitals. Engineers for Britain's Chiltern Railways have devised phone-proof railway carriages by covering the windows with a metallic microfilm impervious to radio waves.

Some telephone companies, keen to prevent a backlash, are now urging their customers to be more mindful of others. NTT DoCoMo, Japan's biggest mobile-phone network, is playing on its name—which sounds like the Japanese for “manners”—to tell its customers to make sure that they take both their phones and their good behaviour with them. Omnipoint, one of America's biggest GSM operators, has produced an excellent little book on wireless etiquette*. SBC Communications, which owns both Cellular One and Pacific Bell, has launched a campaign to promote cellphone etiquette. It has also commissioned Peggy Post, great-granddaughter-in-law of Emily Post, the grande dame of American manners, to draw up some rules of good behaviour.

Mobile-phone companies hope that users are likely to become more considerate as phones become everyday items. They also point out that technology is on the side of good manners. High-quality digital phones make shouting unnecessary. Many phones can be set to vibrate rather than ring. The growing fashion for mobile data transmission means that more people will use their phones in silence.

But a visit to one of the world's most advanced mobile-phone markets—Hong Kong—is not reassuring. The first thing that people do when they sit down to dinner is to put their mobile phones on the table. Throughout the meal, they compete with each other to see who can make and receive the most calls. And when they do speak to each other, it is often to discuss the relative merits of different mobile phones.

* “Wireless Etiquette. A Guide to the Changing World of Instant Communication”, by Peter Laufer. Omnipoint Communications, 1999.