October 11, 2005
Barry Wellman NetLab Director of the Centre for Urban & Community Studies of the University of Toronto was interviewed for a thoughtful long feature of Kenneth Kidd in Sunday's Toronto Star about how iPods and mobile phones are affecting public/private boundaries of community.
By appropriating public space in this way, people are also discounting its value, especially the cellphone users — who actively disturb the peace with their own words, as if those physically around them either don't exist or are beneath noticing.
hand-in-handheld device with another development: As we turn public space into a quilt of private spaces, we're losing our inhibitions.
The iPod people will sing along to their music or engage in what Bull calls "non-reciprocal looking." That's when the lady with the iPod is looking right at you, but you just assume she's not rudely staring since she's probably just engrossed in her music. The iPod, in fact, may now be to people-watching what sunglasses used to be.
And how many times have you been on the street, or queuing up at the checkout counter, and had to listen to people talk into their cellphones about the most intimate and astonishingly mundane details of their life?
"It's not that they don't recognize that it's ill-mannered," says Bull. "Essentially they don't really care."
Does this mean the end of public civility, even the end of community? That depends on how you define it. Several decades ago, one sociologist came up with nearly 70 definitions of community, notes Barry Wellman, sociology professor at the University of Toronto.
But if we take the traditional sense of community — a village or urban village where everyone knew each other and kept track of one another — well, that was already starting to vanish long before cellphones and iPods happened along.
In 1968, Wellman surveyed 845 people in East York, which then prided itself on community ties. He returned a decade later to interview 29 members of the original sample.
"We found that only a small fraction of people's strong relationships were with neighbours," says Wellman. "They only knew the names of four or five neighbours and they only visited maybe one or two."
So the whole notion of a strong, controlling neighbourhood community "has factually not been true" since at least the 1960s. What has replaced it — with the accelerating help of cellphones — is what Wellman calls "networked individualism."
"The big change has been this shift from groups to networks," he says. "They're less formally structured, they're more amorphous."
Those in anyone's network don't have to be physically close, just a cell call away, and it's easier to opt in or opt out of a network than it is a group.
"People can switch around and manoeuvre around. What that does is leave them with some uncertainty in their lives but it also leaves them with some autonomy. It's a switch from public sociability to private sociability."
Your cellphone network becomes, in a sense, an extension of yourself, what some sociologists have begun calling "a third skin."
"The notion is that you should be connected at all times," says Wellman.
There is a small irony in this: "In some ways, it goes back to pre-industrial villages (where) people were always visible. You knew they were at home, or saw them walking from one home to another."
But now it's communication with your personal network that provides the sense of comfort and security that local vision once did. Do you feel safer in your car knowing that, should anything go wrong, help is just a cell call away? Or that you can always phone your peripatetic teenager to see if she's okay?
You could look at this as a trade-off. In return for suffering (and sometimes inflicting) all that cellphone rudeness in the company of strangers, you get safety and apparent freedom from helpless worrying.
But there may be a third way — and salvation from unwanted noise — in a related technology: text-messaging. At least, that is, if we learn anything from Japan, where you're allowed (and technically able) to use cellphones on the subway, but scarcely anyone talks into them.
"You have a lot of people sitting there quietly," says Wellman. "But instead of reading a book or newspaper, their fingers are flying over their cellphones, sending and receiving text messages.
"What you have is a lot of quiet people, very socially connected, but not to each other."
Yes, quiet, and politely respectful of those around you. Heck, you could even do it while listening to your iPod.
n.b. reading the full article requires registration !
Text messaging in Japan is indeed widespread, as I can attest from seeing many Japanese walk down the street at night, their faces lit up in a ghostly manner by the mobile phone backlight. However, travel on foot and by train is the rule. America is still very much a car culture, and try plinking out a text message while driving!
Posted by: Michael Turner at October 14, 2005 02:50 AM