Are Some Technologies Biased Toward Sociability?

The iPod has been vilified as an "anti-social" technology but it sometimes doesn't hurt to look at actual use by actual users. I report on a counter example, where my iPod was the spur for social interaction.

iPod Touch

I commute by bus. It is a long ride, and often quite silent (apart from the rumbling of the engine and tires and wind). People don't necessarily talk to each other on these long suburban bus rides, although sometimes it does get a bit chatty. Mostly, however, we stick to ourselves, lost in thought or drowsy from the swaying of the bus or the lack of sleep provoked by early rising, late nights. The young fathers, in particular, seem to be sufficiently sleep-deprived to sleep anywhere.

Anyway, I have written previously about the concern that personal technologies were turning us into "iPod, were turning people into uncaring, inattentive and inwardly focused non-participants in society," or "ipod zombies". I argued that this isn't a necessary outcome and alternative outcomes are also possible. In fact, technologies are quite often "underdetermined" rather than deterministic of human behaviour and use. This week I had an experience that made that claim quite vivid to me.

I have a new iPod "Touch." The latest personal music player from Apple, it features a large screen and is quite nie for watching video as well as listening to music. I was on my way to work and watching a TV show (Inspector Linley, which I highly recommend, by the way) when the person sitting next to me asked what I was doing. She was a stranger, and I was a little taken aback, but I told her about the device, about the ability to watch (recorded) TV shows, about the show I was watching, and so on. She was intrigued and asked if she could watch, too? She, as it happened, had a "splitter" for headphones, which she carried with her so that she and a friend could listen to the same music on long bus rides to the country when they go hiking. I said, "sure," and proceeded to unplug my headphones, plug in the headphone splitter that she dug out of her purse, and then plug in my, and her, headphones. As soon as we were all set up, I rewound the video a short way, and started it up. As the scene unfolded, I told her who the characters were and what had happened in the story up to that point. We then passed the remainder of the journey watching the show. She had to get off the bus before the show ended, but later that evening we happened to be on the same bus on the way home and I was able to tell her how it turned out.

I wouldn't say was are fast friends now or anything like that, but we have shared a media experience and I can quite easily strike up a new conversation with her, since we now have this much in common. A small step in eroding the anonymity of commuting, and probably only a small counter-example for those who see ill effects in the iPod's proliferation in our society, but I think it illustrates the importance of exploring the tiny behaviours (Voloshinov's "little behaviour genres", which I learned about from Maria Bakardjieva) of information and communication technologies.