National Post article

Amy Brown-Bowers wrote an article based on an interview with me on June 1.

People often hide behind their gadgets, says Richard Smith, an associate professor at Simon Fraser University.

Friday » June 2 » 2006

Gadgets accused of stressing common space

Cell Culture: Loud cellphone talk assailed: Devices such as iPods can be technological cold shoulders

Amy Brown-Bowers

National Post

Thursday, June 01, 2006

The woman who goes into gory details about her pregnancy, the man who makes business deals, the girl who gossips about her friends — and the 50 other people on the bus angry at being forced to listen to these cellphone conversations.

Defenders of democracy and community say that all this jabbering about private matters on cellphones in public is not only irritating, it is polluting public space. Space, they say, that should be reserved for face-to-face engagement and discussion about civics, not South Beach.

"The common space that people share ... is considered to be under stress for at least two reasons and both of them are connected to gadgets ... One is that these gadgets, through rudeness or talking too loudly or just bringing personal things like pregnancy details into a place where my neighbour and I might talk about politics, it's kind of corrosive to public discussion," said Richard Smith, associate professor at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University.

The second reason is that people often hide behind their gadgets. "They flip open their laptop or they get out their BlackBerry or they put in their iPOD and they withdraw from the public sphere," said Mr. Smith, a presenter at Canada's annual Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences at York University this week.

"These devices are all used as a means to refuse to be in the social space; they are technological cold shoulders.... The result ... is 'the erosion of face-to-face community,'" wrote Christine Rosen in her paper, Our Cell Phones, Ourselves, published in the New Atlantic in 2004.

But Mr. Smith thinks that blaming cellphones for the erosion of public space is overly simplistic.

"What you need to do is understand how people use this technology to either engage other people or disengage from people and what drives them to do that ... To paint the phone in this broad brush is really to miss a lot of subtleties," he said.

He mentioned a public debate raging in Hong Kong about a confrontation between two cellphone users caught on video tape and circulated online (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H20dhY01Xjk).

Two men, one much older than the other, are talking on their cell phones while riding a train. The younger man taps the older man on the shoulder and asks him to speak more quietly. The furious older man responds with a lecture about respecting elders as another passenger records the scene.

"Within this issue of gadgets causing a deterioration of the public sphere is actually a case of the gadget both enabling the first layer debate (the two guys talking) ... and then the fact that now millions of people are talking about this," Mr. Smith said.

As for the common complaint that public cellphone users are a rude and inconsiderate bunch, Mr. Smith said that we're forgetting that appropriate public behaviour is both culturally specific and transient.

While the Euro-centric ideal is to be muted and decorous in public — to sit rigidly in a seat and avoid eye contact — this is not the case in many of the countries around the world, countries from which many Canadians have come.

"While we do want some sort of decorum in our daily lives, it's important not to get too hung up on what is rude and what isn't," Mr. Smith said. "These things take time to evolve."

CELL CULTURE:

The following is a selction of countries, and how their residents are most likely to use their cell phones.

MOROCCO: "If I don't know your number, I'm not picking up." Use of caller ID and call screening is wide spread.

INDIA AND GERMANY: "I'll send you a missed call." Caller with more expensive plan rings once and hangs up — a signal for the recipient to call back on their cheaper plan.

FRANCE: "Please excuse me." People will leave the restaurant to talk and use muted or murmuring voices.

PHILIPPINES: "Yackety yak;" Common to see two people out for dinner yakking away on their phones with other people.

IRELAND: "Hang on, I need my fingers." Interrupting a cellphone conversation to text-message someone else.

SWITZERLAND: "Before we begin...." Announcing an expected phone call before a meeting begins. When call comes, they pick up the phone and walk out.

(Source: Richard Smith, assistant professor at Simon Fraser University)

© National Post 2006

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