http://tinyurl.com/9v39a
Toronto Star
Oct. 9, 2005. 01:00 AM
CHRISTOPHE ENA/AP
The iPod Nano.
It's all in your head
Community, that is. Cellphones and iPods are turning public space
into private space, a phenomenon that's changing how we relate to
each other.
KENNETH KIDD
Wade Oosterman is rattling off all the glorious gadgetry of the
latest cellphones and their more muscular sibling, the wireless
pocket PC. Digital camera, check. Video-cam, music player and
television, check. Internet access, email, text messaging — all there
as well, along with Excel spreadsheets and global satellite positioning.
Oh, and Solitaire, of course, just one of myriad games, not least
Texas Hold'em, in which the other players (and their wireless
devices) can be scattered around the planet. "That's pretty neat,"
says Oosterman, who, as director of marketing at Telus Corp.,
obviously has found a job to his liking.
Coming soon: wireless devices that can scan a bar code in a magazine
ad and take you to the advertiser's website where you'll find more
information and (naturally) the form to place your order.
Contemplating all this, Oosterman reckons money is starting to lose
some of its catalytic role in modern life. "Now it's phones that make
the world go round," he says. "It's really information."
About five minutes into Oosterman's spiel, his cellphone rings for
the third time. "Sorry," he says. "This is going to happen the whole
time. Is that all right? I may just turn it off."
That's the other thing about cellphones: To take advantage of all
those wondrous functions, to use them as intended, you have to turn
them on. And you know what happens after that: constant interruptions.
Is this good? So far, the bulk of academic fretting about the
wireless world has been fixed squarely on the Big Brother issues of
security, privacy and surveillance.
But what about the other fundamental implications for society, our
sense of community and the way we use public space? And what are we
to make of that other popular piece of new technology, the iPod,
whose chief allure is that it is not a cellphone? Rarely have two
leading-edge products come so freighted with opposing ideals. Are we
to become a society divided?
"I kind of think of it in terms of continuous and discontinuous,"
says Michael Bull, senior lecturer in media studies at the University
of Sussex. "When you use an iPod, it's about continual immersion in
sound, uninterrupted, which kind of makes the user feel very much
empowered."
The iPod crew, or iPeople, if you will, essentially shape their own
perceptions of the world around them, like movie producers applying
different soundtracks to the same film script. Whether you're looking
at people lining up for the subway or a beggar on the street, what
your mind sees — and consequently your mood — is bound to be affected
by whether you're listening to, say, Gershwin or Tom Waits.
Wireless devices, by contrast, bring none of that control. "Mobile
phones are about the discontinuous; that is, interruption," says
Bull. "Always connected means essentially often powerless."
For his upcoming book, Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban
Experience, Bull interviewed more than 1,000 iPod users, mostly in
North America and Europe, and discovered that a good 25 per cent of
them actually hated cellphones.
That still leaves a majority of iPod users who don't loathe cell
phones, but even they often approach wireless devices with a kind of
wariness. "A lot of them would not use their phone when listening (to
their iPods)," says Bull. "They would wait until they'd finished
listening to their music."
It's easy to imagine the iPeople being the polite ones, especially
when you consider the oft-repeated tale of the woman talking on her
cellphone aboard a crowded New York bus. She's having a loud and
extended discussion with her husband regarding whether they should
have salmon or steak for dinner. Finally, an exasperated man across
the aisle yells, "Salmon." At which point, everyone else on the bus
(and in the spirit of Seinfeld) starts chanting, "Salmon, salmon,
salmon." It's a tale apocryphal in its details, perhaps, but not in
its spirit.
At the back of the bus, presumably, is an iPod guy, gazing out the
window, oblivious to all but the self-made movie he's watching.
Yet cellphone users and iPeople have one fundamental thing in common:
They are both appropriating public space for their own use.
"There is this whole business of space becoming less and less public
space, and more and more taking private space outside with you," says
Robert Pike, a professor emeritus at Queen's University writing a
book about global communications between 1860 and 1930.
It may have a lot to do with the sheer amount and variety of
communication technology that we've stuffed into our homes. Back when
the Beaver was still in short pants, the typical home would have a
single, hardwired telephone, one television set and likely just one
hi-fi system for playing records.
Now just about every family member has his or her own collection of
communication equipment — a cellphone, television, computer, game
player and stereo system. "What you see is a slow division of the
home into individualized nodules," says Bull. "Those kind of
predispositions then get taken out onto the street.
"The technology doesn't happen in abstract," he adds. "They're part
of a long history of the individualizing of experience."
The iPod people will sing along to their music or engage in `non-
reciprocal looking'
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.
That goes 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.
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