Sekai Camera’s presentation during the Marketing 2.0 Conference
Posted on April 30, 2009
Aïcha Charpentier
Have you ever heard of augmented reality? The principle is simple. It consists of projecting the virtual on the real in order to enhance the natural environment thanks to digital data. This is the concept on which the Sekai Camera application, a service launched by Japanese start-up Tonchidot, rests. Thanks to a camera and GPS, this application enables one to acquire data on physical constituents that have been "geo-tagged". This content is then superimposed over the image on the screen to create a product’s, service’s or person’s dossier. Original, innovative and revolutionary, this tool offers opportunities that may have been thought impossible until now.
By filming the world around you, it will be possible to collect digital data on objects and people. Thanks to tags (little bubbles) that appear on the iPhone screen, one can become a perfectly educated customer.
Examples:
You are at the supermarket and wish to find out more about a new product. You film, click on the tag, and it shows you information such as the price, the composition, and distribution locations. In fact, you can even reserve it, or buy it via an e-commerce website.
You are in front of a billboard advertising an exhibit at a museum. Unfortunately, you are not familiar with any of the artists. Shoot, click, and you will immediately have access to their practices and what kind of art they create.
You are walking around the city looking for a restaurant to dine at. You click on the "restaurant finder" mode, and based on where you are, tags show up on the screen with menus, prices and customer comments. With this application it is also possible to post comments on places and establishments you have visited. If your friends happen to be in the area and also have the application, they could benefit from your comments.
Last example, you are at the Marketing 2.0 Conference organized by Vanksen. Mr. X is speaking, you film him, and you instantly know his name, his occupation and professional status. Up to you send him a message if you please.
I’m sure that you can now appreciate the potential of this application. There are numerous uses, and unimaginable advantages! For the moment, this application is in small scale production, only available to the cell phone savvy Japanese market. It will take some time and numerous collaborations between cell phone companies, advertising agencies, e-commerce sites and content suppliers until the wonderful application is available on the European or American market.
In short, Sekai Camera might become a must-have for consumers as well as professionals. And even more importantly, new sectors could be born out of it, ones that could eventually participate in rebuilding our world in crisis. Despite this huge potential, we will have to patiently wait for its availability and use on the American and European fronts.
For more information on the application, below is a video of the presentation that took place at the Marketing 2.0 Conference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw9I37IH3ZI&NR=1
http://www.culture-buzz.com/blog/An-iPhone-Application-That-Might-Change-Our-Lives-2148.html
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Friday, February 26, 2010
Our Cell Phones, Ourselves
Christine Rosen
Hell is other people,” Sartre observed, but you need not be a misanthrope or a diminutive French existentialist to have experienced similar feelings during the course of a day. No matter where you live or what you do, in all likelihood you will eventually find yourself participating in that most familiar and exasperating of modern rituals: unwillingly listening to someone else’s cell phone conversation. Like the switchboard operators of times past, we are now all privy to calls being put through, to the details of loved ones contacted, appointments made, arguments aired, and gossip exchanged.
Today, more people have cell phones than fixed telephone lines, both in the United States and internationally. There are more than one billion cell phone users worldwide, and as one wireless industry analyst recently told Slate, “some time between 2010 and 2020, everyone who wants and can afford a cell phone will have one.” Americans spend, on average, about seven hours a month talking on their cell phones. Wireless phones have become such an important part of our everyday lives that in July, the country’s major wireless industry organization featured the following “quick poll” on its website: “If you were stranded on a desert island and could have one thing with you, what would it be?” The choices: “Matches/Lighter,” “Food/Water,” “Another Person,” “Wireless Phone.” The World Health Organization has even launched an “International EMF Project” to study the possible health effects of the electromagnetic fields created by wireless technologies.
But if this ubiquitous technology is now a normal part of life, our adjustment to it has not been without consequences. Especially in the United States, where cell phone use still remains low compared to other countries, we are rapidly approaching a tipping point with this technology. How has it changed our behavior, and how might it continue to do so? What new rules ought we to impose on its use? Most importantly, how has the wireless telephone encouraged us to connect individually but disconnect socially, ceding, in the process, much that was civil and civilized about the use of public space?
Untethered
Connection has long served as a potent sign of power. In the era before cell phones, popular culture served up presidents, tin-pot dictators, and crime bosses who were never far from a prominently placed row of phones, demonstrating their importance at the hub of a vast nexus. Similarly, superheroes always owned special communications devices: Batman had the Batphone, Dick Tracy his wrist-phone, Maxwell Smart his shoe spy phone. (In the Flash comics of the 1940s, the hero simply outraces phone calls as they are made, avoiding altogether the need for special communication devices.) To be able to talk to anyone, at any time, without the mediator of the human messenger and without the messenger’s attendant delays, is a thoroughly modern triumph of human engineering.
In 1983, Motorola introduced DynaTAC, now considered the first truly mobile telephone, and by the end of that year, the first commercial cellular phone systems were being used in Chicago and in the Baltimore/Washington, D.C. area. Nokia launched its own mobile phone, the cumbersome Cityman, in 1987. Americans were introduced to the glamour of mobile telephone communication that same year in a scene from the movie Wall Street. In it, the ruthless Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) self-importantly conducts his business on the beach using a large portable phone. These first-generation cell phones were hardly elegant—many people called them “luggables” rather than “portables,” and as one reporter noted in The Guardian, “mobiles of that era are often compared to bricks, but this is unfair. Bricks are quite attractive and relatively light.” But they made up in symbolic importance what they lacked in style; only the most powerful and wealthiest people owned them. Indeed, in the 1980s, the only other people besides the elite and medical professionals who had mobile technologies at all (such as pagers) were presumed to be using them for nefarious reasons. Who else but a roving drug dealer or prostitute would need to be accessible at all times?
This changed in the 1990s, when cell phones became cheaper, smaller, and more readily available. The technology spread rapidly, as did the various names given to it: in Japan it is keitai, in China it’s sho ji, Germans call their cell phones handy, in France it is le portable or le G, and in Arabic, el mobile, telephone makhmul, or telephone gowal. In countries where cell phone use is still limited to the elite—such as Bulgaria, where only 2.5 percent of the population can afford a cell phone—its power as a symbol of wealth and prestige remains high. But in the rest of the world, it has become a technology for the masses. There were approximately 340,000 wireless subscribers in the United States in 1985, according to the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Associate (CTIA); by 1995, that number had increased to more than 33 million, and by 2003, more than 158 million people in the country had gone wireless.
Why do people use cell phones? The most frequently cited reason is convenience, which can cover a rather wide range of behaviors. Writing in the Wall Street Journal this spring, an executive for a wireless company noted that “in Slovakia, people are using mobile phones to remotely switch on the heat before they return home,” and in Norway, “1.5 million people can confirm their tax returns” using cell phone short text messaging services. Paramedics use camera phones to send ahead to hospitals pictures of the incoming injuries; “in Britain, it is now commonplace for wireless technology to allow companies to remotely access meters or gather diagnostic information.” Construction workers on-site can use cell phones to send pictures to contractors off-site. Combined with the individual use of cell phones—to make appointments, locate a friend, check voicemail messages, or simply to check in at work—cell phones offer people a heretofore unknown level of convenience.
More than ninety percent of cell phone users also report that owning a cell phone makes them feel safer. The CTIA noted that in 2001, nearly 156,000 wireless emergency service calls were made every day—about 108 calls per minute. Technological Good Samaritans place calls to emergency personnel when they see traffic accidents or crimes-in-progress; individuals use their cell phones to call for assistance when a car breaks down or plans go awry. The safety rationale carries a particular poignancy after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. On that day, many men and women used cell phones to speak their final words to family and loved ones. Passengers on hijacked airplanes called wives and husbands; rescue workers on the ground phoned in to report their whereabouts. As land lines in New York and Washington, D.C., became clogged, many of us made or received frantic phone calls on cell phones—to reassure others that we were safe or to make sure that our friends and family were accounted for. Many people who had never considered owning a cell phone bought one after September 11th. If the cultural image we had of the earliest cell phones was of a technology glamorously deployed by the elite, then the image of cell phones today has to include people using them for this final act of communication, as well as terrorists who used cell phones as detonators in the bombing of trains in Madrid.
Of course, the perceived need for a technological safety device can encourage distinctly irrational behavior and create new anxieties. Recently, when a professor at Rutgers University asked his students to experiment with turning off their cell phones for 48 hours, one young woman told University Wire, “I felt like I was going to get raped if I didn’t have my cell phone in my hand. I carry it in case I need to call someone for help.” Popular culture endorses this image of cell-phone-as-life-line. The trailer for a new suspense movie, Cellular, is currently making the rounds in theaters nationwide. In it, an attractive young man is shown doing what young men apparently do with their camera-enabled cell phones: taking pictures of women in bikinis and e-mailing the images to himself. When he receives a random but desperate phone call from a woman who claims to be the victim of a kidnapping, he finds himself drawn into a race to find and save her, all the while trying to maintain that tenuous cell phone connection. It is indicative of our near-fetishistic attachment to our cell phones that we can relate (and treat as a serious moment of suspense) a scene in the movie where the protagonist, desperately trying to locate a cell phone charger before his battery runs out, holds the patrons of an electronics store at gunpoint until the battery is rejuvenated. After scenes of high-speed car chases and large explosions, the trailer closes with a disembodied voice asking the hero, “How did you get involved?” His response? “I just answered my phone.”
Many parents have responded to this perceived need for personal security by purchasing cell phones for their children, but this, too, has had some unintended consequences. One sociologist has noted that parents who do this are implicitly commenting on their own sense of security or insecurity in society. “Claiming to care about their children’s safety,” Chantal de Gournay writes, “parents develop a ‘paranoiac’ vision of the community, reflecting a lack of trust in social institutions and in any environment other than the family.” As a result, they choose surveillance technologies, such as cell phones, to monitor their children, rather than teaching them (and trusting them) to behave appropriately. James E. Katz, a communications professor at Rutgers who has written extensively about wireless communication, argues that parents who give children cell phones are actually weakening the traditional bonds of authority; “parents think they can reach kids any time they want, and thus are more indulgent of their children’s wanderings,” Katz notes. Not surprisingly, “my cell phone battery died” has become a popular excuse among teenagers for failure to check in with their parents. And I suspect nearly everyone, at some point, has suffered hours of panic when a loved one who was supposed to be “reachable” failed to answer the cell phone.
Although cell phones are a technology with broad appeal, we do not all use our cell phones in the same way. In June 2004, Cingular announced that “for the fourth year in a row, men prove to be the more talkative sex in the wireless world,” talking 16 percent more on their phones than women. Women, however, are more likely to use a cell phone “to talk to friends and family” while men use theirs for business—including, evidently, the business of mating. Researchers found that “men are using their mobile phones as peacocks use their immobilizing feathers and male bullfrogs use their immoderate croaks: To advertise to females their worth, status, and desirability,” reported the New York Times. The researchers also discovered that many of the men they observed in pubs and nightclubs carried fake cell phones, likely one of the reasons they titled their paper “Mobile Phones as Lekking Devices Among Human Males,” a lek being a “communal mating area where males gather to engage in flamboyant courtship displays.” Or, as another observer of cell phone behavior succinctly put it: “the mobile is widely used for psychosexual purposes of performance and display.”
The increasingly sophisticated accessories available on cell phones encourage such displays. One new phone hitting the market boasts video capture and playback, a 1.2 megapixel camera, a 256 color screen, speakerphone, removable memory, mp3 player, Internet access, and a global positioning system. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on cell phones that will feature radios, calculators, alarm clocks, flashlights, and mirrored compacts. Phones are “becoming your Swiss army knife,” one product developer enthused. Hyperactive peacocking will also be abetted by the new walkie-talkie function available on many phones, which draws further attention to the user by broadcasting to anyone within hearing distance the conversation of the person on the other end of the phone.
With all these accoutrements, it is not surprising that one contributor to a discussion list about wireless technology recently compared cell phones and BlackBerrys to “electronic pets.” Speaking to a group of business people, he reported, “you constantly see people taking their little pets out and stroking the scroll wheel, coddling them, basically ‘petting’ them.” When confined to a basement conference room, he found that participants “were compelled to ‘walk’ their electronic pets on breaks” to check their messages. In parts of Asia, young women carry their phones in decorated pouches, worn like necklaces, or in pants with specially designed pockets that keep the phone within easy reach. We have become thigmophilic with our technology—touch-loving—a trait we share with rats, as it happens. We are constantly taking them out, fiddling with them, putting them away, taking them out again, reprogramming their directories, text messaging. And cell phone makers are always searching for new ways to exploit our attachments. Nokia offers “expression” phones that allow customization of faceplates and ring tones. Many companies, such as Modtones, sell song samples for cell phone ringers. In Asia, where cell phone use among the young is especially high, companies offer popular anime and manga cartoons as downloadable “wallpaper” for cell phones.
Cell phone technology is also creating new forms of social and political networking. “Moblogging,” or mobile web logging, allows cell phone users to publish and update content to the World Wide Web. An increasing number of companies are offering cell phones with WiFi capability, and as Sadie Plant noted recently in a report she prepared for Motorola, “On the Mobile,” “today, the smallest Motorola phone has as much computing power in it as the largest, most expensive computer did less than a generation ago.” In his Forbes “Wireless Outlook” newsletter, Andrew Seybold predicted, “in twenty five years there aren’t going to be any wired phones left and I think it might happen even much sooner than that—ten to fifteen years.” As well, “the phone will be tied much more closely to the person. Since the phone is the person, the person will be the number.” It isn’t surprising that one of Seybold’s favorite movies is the James Coburn paranoid comedy, The President’s Analyst (1967), whose premise “centered on attempts by the phone company to capture the president’s psychoanalyst in order to further a plot to have phone devices implanted in people’s brains at birth.” Ma Bell meets The Manchurian Candidate.
Dodgeball.com, a new social-networking service, applies the principles of websites such as Friendster to cell phones. “Tell us where you are and we’ll tell you who and what is around you,” Dodgeball promises. “We’ll ping your friends with your whereabouts, let you know when friends-of-friends are within ten blocks, allow you to broadcast content to anyone within ten blocks of you or blast messages to your groups of friends.” The service is now available in fifteen cities in the U.S., enabling a form of friendly pseudo-stalking. “I was at Welcome to the Johnson’s and a girl came up behind me and gave a tap on the shoulder,” one recent testimonial noted. “‘Are you this guy?’ she inquired while holding up her cell phone to show my Dodgeball photo. I was indeed.”
Political organizers have also found cell phone technology to be a valuable tool. Throughout 2000 in the Philippines, the country’s many cell phone users were text-messaging derogatory slogans and commentary about then-President Joseph Estrada. With pressure on the Estrada administration mounting, activists organized large demonstrations against the president by activating cell phone “trees” to summon protesters to particular locations and to outmaneuver riot police. Estrada was forced from office in January 2001. Anti-globalization protesters in Seattle and elsewhere (using only non-corporate cell phones, surely) have employed the technology to stage and control movements during demonstrations.
Communication Delinquents
The ease of mobile communication does not guarantee positive results for all those who use it, of course, and the list of unintended negative consequences from cell phone use continues to grow. The BBC world service reported in 2001, “senior Islamic figures in Singapore have ruled that Muslim men cannot divorce their wives by sending text messages over their mobile phones.” (Muslims can divorce their wives by saying the word “talaq,” which means “I divorce you,” three times).
Concerns about the dangers of cell phone use while driving have dominated public discussion of cell phone risks. A 2001 study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that “54 percent of drivers ‘usually’ have some type of wireless phone in their vehicle with them” and that this translates into approximately 600,000 drivers “actively using cell phones at any one time” on the road. Women and drivers in the suburbs were found to talk and drive more often, and “the highest national use rates were observed for drivers of vans and sport utility vehicles.” New York, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C. all require drivers to use hands-free technology (headsets or speakerphones) when talking on the cell.
Cell phones can also play host to viruses, real and virtual. A 2003 study presented at the American Society for Microbiology’s conference on infectious disease found that twelve percent of the cell phones used by medical personnel in an Israeli hospital were contaminated with bacteria. (Another recent cell phone-related health research result, purporting a link between cell phone use and decreased sperm counts, has been deemed inconclusive.) The first computer virus specifically targeting cell phones was found in late June. As The Guardian reported recently, anti-virus manufacturers believe that “the mobile phone now mirrors how the Net has developed over the past two or three years—blighted with viruses as people got faster connections and downloaded more information.”
With technology comes addiction, and applicable neologisms have entered the lexicon—such as “crackberry,” which describes the dependence exhibited by some BlackBerry wireless users. In a 2001 article in New York magazine about feuding couples, one dueling duo, Dave and Brooke, traded barbs about her wireless addictions. “I use it when I’m walking down the street,” Brooke said proudly. “She was checking her voice mail in the middle of a Seder!” was Dave’s exasperated response. “Under the table!” Brooke clarified. A recent survey conducted by the Hospital of Seoul National University found that “3 out of 10 Korean high school students who carry mobile phones are reported to be addicted” to them. Many reported feeling anxious without their phones and many displayed symptoms of repetitive stress injury from obsessive text messaging.
The cell phone has also proven effective as a facilitator and alibi for adulterous behavior. “I heard someone (honest) talking about their ‘shag phone’ the other day,” a visitor to a wireless technology blog recently noted. “He was a married man having an affair with a lady who was also married. It seems that one of the first heady rituals of the affair was to purchase a ‘his and her’ pair of pre-pay shag phones.” A recent story in the New York Times documented the use of cell phone “alibi and excuse clubs” that function as an ethically challenged form of networking—Dodgeball for the delinquent. “Cell phone-based alibi clubs, which have sprung up in the United States, Europe, and Asia, allow people to send out mass text messages to thousands of potential collaborators asking for help. When a willing helper responds, the sender and the helper devise a lie, and the helper then calls the victim with the excuse,” the report noted. One woman who started her own alibi club, which has helped spouses cheat on each other and workers mislead their bosses, “said she was not terribly concerned about lying,” although she did concede: “You wouldn’t really want your friends to know you’re sparing people’s feelings with these white lies.” Websites such as Kargo offer features like “Soundster,” which allows users to “insert sounds into your call and control your environment.” Car horns, sirens, the coughs and sniffles of the sick room—all can be simulated in order to fool the listener on the other end of the call. Technology, it seems, is allowing people to make instrumental use of anonymous strangers while maintaining the appearance of trustworthiness within their own social group.
Technology has also led to further incursions on personal privacy. Several websites now offer “candid pornography,” peeping-Tom pictures taken in locker rooms, bathrooms, and dressing rooms by unscrupulous owners of cell phone cameras. Camera phones pose a potentially daunting challenge to privacy and security; unlike old-fashioned cameras, which could be confiscated and the film destroyed, digital cameras, including those on cell phones, allow users to send images instantaneously to any e-mail address. The images can be stored indefinitely, and the evidence that a picture was ever taken can be destroyed.
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
Certain public interactions carry with them certain unspoken rules of behavior. When approaching a grocery store checkout line, you queue behind the last person in line and wait your turn. On the subway, you make way for passengers entering and exiting the cars. Riding on the train, you expect the interruptions of the ticket taker and the periodic crackling blare of station announcements. What you never used to expect, but must now endure, is the auditory abrasion of a stranger arguing about how much he does, indeed, owe to his landlord. I’ve heard business deals, lovers’ quarrels, and the most unsavory gossip. I’ve listened to strangers discuss in excruciating detail their own and others’ embarrassing medical conditions; I’ve heard the details of recent real estate purchases, job triumphs, and awful dates. (The only thing I haven’t heard is phone sex, but perhaps it is only a matter of time.) We are no longer overhearing, which implies accidentally stumbling upon a situation where two people are talking in presumed privacy. Now we are all simply hearing. The result is a world where social space is overtaken by anonymous, unavoidable background noise—a quotidian narration that even in its more interesting moments rarely rises above the tone of a penny dreadful. It seems almost cruel, in this context, that Motorola’s trademarked slogan for its wireless products is “Intelligence Everywhere.”
Why do these cell phone conversations bother us more than listening to two strangers chatter in person about their evening plans or listening to a parent scold a recalcitrant child? Those conversations are quantitatively greater, since we hear both sides of the discussion—so why are they nevertheless experienced as qualitatively different? Perhaps it is because cell phone users harbor illusions about being alone or assume a degree of privacy that the circumstances don’t actually allow. Because cell phone talkers are not interacting with the world around them, they come to believe that the world around them isn’t really there and surely shouldn’t intrude. And when the cell phone user commandeers the space by talking, he or she sends a very clear message to others that they are powerless to insist on their own use of the space. It is a passive-aggressive but extremely effective tactic.
Such encounters can sometimes escalate into rude intransigence or even violence. In the past few years alone, men and women have been stabbed, escorted off of airplanes by federal marshals, pepper-sprayed in movie theaters, ejected from concert halls, and deliberately rammed with cars as a result of their bad behavior on their cell phones. The Zagat restaurant guide reports that cell phone rudeness is now the number one complaint of diners, and USA Today notes that “fifty-nine percent of people would rather visit the dentist than sit next to someone using a cell phone.”
The etiquette challenges posed by cell phones are universal, although different countries have responded in slightly different ways. Writing about the impact of cell phone technology in The Guardian in 2002, James Meek noted, with moderate horror, that cell phones now encourage British people to do what “British people aren’t supposed to do: invite strangers, spontaneously, into our personal worlds. We let everyone know what our accent is, what we do for a living, what kind of stuff we do in our non-working hours.” In France, cell phone companies were pressured by the public to censor the last four digits of phone numbers appearing on monthly statements, because so many French men and women were using them to confirm that their significant other was having an affair.
In Israel, where the average person is on a cell phone four times as much as the average American, and where cell phone technology boasts an impressive 76 percent penetration rate (the United States isn’t projected to reach that level until 2009), the incursion of cell phones into daily life is even more dramatic. As sociologists Amit Schejter and Akiba Cohen found, there were no less than ten cell phone interruptions during a recent staging of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at Israel’s National Theater, and “there has even been an anecdote reported of an undertaker’s phone ringing inside a grave as the deceased was being put to rest.” The authors explain this state of affairs with reference to the Israeli personality, which they judge to be more enthusiastic about technology and more forceful in exerting itself in public; the subtitle of their article is “chutzpah and chatter in the Holy Land.”
In the U.S., mild regional differences in the use of cell phones are evident. Reporting on a survey by Cingular wireless, CNN noted that cell phone users in the South “are more likely to silence their phones in church,” while Westerners “are most likely to turn a phone off in libraries, theaters, restaurants, and schools.” But nationwide, cell phones still frequently interrupt movie screenings, theater performances, and concerts. Audience members are not the sole offenders, either. My sister, a professional musician, told me that during one performance, in the midst of a slow and quiet passage of Verdi’s Requiem, the cell phone of one of the string players in the orchestra began ringing, much to the horror of his fellow musicians.
We cannot simply banish to Tartarus—the section of Hades reserved for punishment of the worst offenders—all those who violate the rules of social space. And the noise pollution generated by rude cell phone users is hardly the worst violation of social order; it is not the same as defacing a statue, for example. Other countries offer some reason for optimism: In societies that maintain more formality, such as Japan, loud public conversation is considered rude, and Japanese people will often cover their mouths and hide their phones from view when speaking into them.
Not surprisingly, Americans have turned to that most hallowed but least effective solution to social problems: public education. Cingular Wireless, for example, has launched a public awareness campaign whose slogan is “Be Sensible.” The program includes an advertisement shown in movie theaters about “Inconsiderate Cell Phone Guy,” a parody of bad behavior that shows a man talking loudly into his cell phone at inappropriate times: during a date, in a movie, at a wedding, in the middle of a group therapy session. It is a miniature manners nickelodeon for the wireless age. July is now officially National Cell Phone Courtesy Month, and etiquette experts such as Jacqueline Whitmore of the Protocol School of Palm Beach advise companies such as Sprint about how to encourage better behavior in their subscribers. Whitmore is relentlessly positive: “Wireless technology is booming so quickly and wireless phones have become so popular, the rules on wireless etiquette are still evolving,” she notes on her website. She cites hopeful statistics culled from public opinion surveys that say “98 percent of Americans say they move away from others when talking on a wireless phone in public” and “the vast majority (86 percent) say they ‘never’ or ‘rarely’ speak on wireless phones while conducting an entire public transaction with someone else such as a sales clerk or bank teller.” If you are wondering where these examples of wireless rectitude reside, you might find them in the land of wishful thinking. There appears to be a rather large disconnect between people’s actual behavior and their reports of their behavior.
Whitmore is correct to suggest that we are in the midst of a period of adjustment. We still have the memory of the old social rules, which remind us to be courteous towards others, especially in confined environments such as trains and elevators. But it is becoming increasingly clear that cell phone technology itself has disrupted our ability to insist on the enforcement of social rules. Etiquette experts urge us to adjust—be polite, don’t return boorish behavior with boorish behavior, set a standard of probity in your own use of cell phones. But in doing so these experts tacitly concede that every conversation is important, and that we need only learn how and when to have them. This elides an older rule: when a conversation takes place in public, its merit must be judged in part by the standards of the other participants in the social situation. By relying solely on self-discipline and public education (or that ubiquitous modern state of “awareness”), the etiquette experts have given us a doomed manual. Human nature being what it is, individuals will spend more time rationalizing their own need to make cell phone calls than thinking about how that need might affect others. Worse, the etiquette experts offer diversions rather than standards, encouraging alternatives to calling that nevertheless still succeed in removing people from the social space. “Use text messaging,” is number 7 on Whitmore’s Ten Tips for the Cell Phone Savvy.
These attempts at etiquette training also evade another reality: the decline of accepted standards for social behavior. In each of us lurks the possibility of a Jekyll-and-Hyde-like transformation, its trigger the imposition of some arbitrary rule. The problem is that, in the twenty-first century, with the breakdown of hierarchies and manners, all social rules are arbitrary. “I don’t think we have to worry about people being rude intentionally,” Whitmore told Wireless Week. “Most of us simply haven’t come to grips with the new responsibilities wireless technologies demand.” But this seems foolishly optimistic. A psychologist quoted in a story by UPI recently noted the “baffling sense of entitlement” demonstrated by citizens in the wireless world. “They don’t get sheepish when shushed,” he marveled. “You’re the rude one.” And contra Ms. Whitmore, there is intention at work in this behavior, even if it is not intentional rudeness. It is the intentional removal of oneself from the social situation in public space. This removal, as sociologists have long shown, is something more serious than a mere manners lapse. It amounts to a radical disengagement from the public sphere.
Spectator Sport
We know that the reasons people give for owning cell phones are largely practical—convenience and safety. But the reason we answer them whenever they ring is a question better left to sociology and psychology. In works such as Behavior in Public Spaces, Relations in Public, and Interaction Ritual, the great sociologist Erving Goffman mapped the myriad possibilities of human interaction in social space, and his observations take on a new relevance in our cell phone world. Crucial to Goffman’s analysis was the notion that in social situations where strangers must interact, “the individual is obliged to ‘come into play’ upon entering the situation and to stay ‘in play’ while in the situation.” Failure to demonstrate this presence sends a clear message to others of one’s hostility or disrespect for the social gathering. It effectively turns them into “non-persons.” Like the piqued lover who rebuffs her partner’s attempt to caress her, the person who removes himself from the social situation is sending a clear message to those around him: I don’t need you.
Although Goffman wrote in the era before cell phones, he might have judged their use as a “subordinate activity,” a way to pass the time such as reading or doodling that could and should be set aside when the dominant activity resumes. Within social space, we are allowed to perform a range of these secondary activities, but they must not impose upon the social group as a whole or require so much attention that they remove us from the social situation altogether. The opposite appears to be true today. The group is expected never to impinge upon—indeed, it is expected to tacitly endorse by enduring—the individual’s right to withdraw from social space by whatever means he or she chooses: cell phones, BlackBerrys, iPods, DVDs screened on laptop computers. These devices are all used as a means to refuse to be “in” the social space; they are technological cold shoulders that are worse than older forms of subordinate activity in that they impose visually and auditorily on others. Cell phones are not the only culprits here. A member of my family, traveling recently on the Amtrak train from New York, was shocked to realize that the man sitting in front of her was watching a pornographic movie on his laptop computer—a movie whose raunchy scenes were reflected in the train window and thus clearly visible to her. We have allowed what should be subordinate activities in social space to become dominant.
One of the groups Goffman studied keenly were mental patients, many of them residents at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., and his comparisons often draw on the remarkable disconnect between the behavior of people in normal society and those who had been institutionalized for mental illness. It is striking in revisiting Goffman’s work how often people who use cell phones seem to be acting more like the people in the asylum than the ones in respectable society. Goffman describes “occult involvements,” for example, as any activity that undermines others’ ability to feel engaged in social space. “When an individual is perceived in an occult involvement, observers may not only sense that they are not able to claim him at the moment,” Goffman notes, “but also feel that the offender’s complete activity up till then has been falsely taken as a sign of participation with them, that all along he has been alienated from their world.” Who hasn’t observed someone sitting quietly, apparently observing the rules of social space, only to launch into loud conversation as soon as the cell phone rings? This is the pretense of social participation Goffman observed in patients at St. Elizabeth’s.
Goffman called those who declined to respond to social overtures as being “out of contact,” and said “this state is often felt to be full evidence that he is very sick indeed, that he is, in fact, cut off from all contact with the world around him.” To be accessible meant to be available in the particular social setting and to act appropriately. Today, of course, being accessible means answering your cell phone, which brings you in contact with your caller, but “out of contact” in the physical social situation, be it a crosstown bus, a train, an airplane, or simply walking down the street.
In terms of the rules of social space, cell phone use is a form of communications panhandling—forcing our conversations on others without first gaining their tacit approval. “The force that keeps people in their communication place in our middle-class society,” Goffman observed, “seems to be the fear of being thought forward and pushy, or odd, the fear of forcing a relationship where none is desired.” But middle class society itself has decided to upend such conventions in the service of greater accessibility and convenience. This is a dramatic shift that took place in a very short span of time, and it is worth at least considering the long-term implications of this subversion of norms. The behavioral rules Goffman so effectively mapped exist to protect everyone, even if we don’t, individually, always need them. They are the social equivalent of fire extinguishers placed throughout public buildings. You hope not to have to use them too often, but they can ensure that a mere spark does not become an embarrassing conflagration. In a world that eschews such norms, we find ourselves plagued by the behavior that Goffman used to witness only among the denizens of the asylum: disembodied talk that renders all of us unwilling listeners.
We also use our cell phones to exert our status in social space, like the remnants of the entourage or train, which “led a worthy to demonstrate his status by the cluster of dependent supporters that accompanied him through a town or a house of parliament.” Modern celebrities still have such escorts (a new cable television series, Entourage, tracks a fictional celebrity posse). But cell phones give all of us the unusual ability to simulate an entourage. My mother-in-law recently found herself sharing an elevator (in the apartment building she’s lived in for forty years) with a man who was speaking very loudly into his cell phone. When she asked him to keep his voice down, he became enraged and began yelling at her; he was, he said, in the midst of an “important” conversation with his secretary. He acted, in other words, as if she’d trounced on the hem of his royal train. She might have had a secretary too, of course—for all he knew she might have a fleet of assistants at her disposal—but because she wasn’t communicating with someone at that moment and he, thanks to his cell phone, was, her status in the social space was, in effect, demoted.
The language of wireless technology itself suggests its selfishness as a medium. One of the latest advances is the “Personal Area Network,” a Bluetooth technology used in Palm Pilots and other personal digital assistants. The network is individualized, closed to unwelcome intruders, and totally dependent on the choices of the user. We now have our own technological assistants and networks, quite an impressive kingdom for ordinary mortals. In this kingdom, our cell phones reassure us by providing constant contact, and we become much like a child with a security blanket or Dumbo with his feather. Like a security blanket, which is also visible to observers, cell phones provide the “‘publicization’ of emotional fulfillment,” as French sociologist Chantal de Gournay has argued. “At work, in town, while traveling—every call on the mobile phone secretly expresses a message to the public: ‘Look how much I’m in demand, how full my life is.’” Unlike those transitional objects of childhood, however, few of us are eager to shed our cell phones.
Absent Without Leave
Our daily interactions with cell phone users often prompt heated exchanges and promises of furious retribution. When New York Times columnist Joe Sharkey asked readers to send in their cell phone horror stories, he was deluged with responses: “There is not enough time in the day to relay the daily torment I must endure from these cell-yellers,” one woman said. “There’s always some self-important jerk who must holler his business all the way into Manhattan,” another commuter wearily noted. Rarely does one find a positive story about cell phone users who behaved politely, observing the common social space.
Then again, we all apparently have a cell phone alter idem, a second self that we endlessly excuse for making just such annoying cell phone calls. As a society, we are endlessly forgiving of our own personal “emergencies” that require cell phone conversation and easily apoplectic about having to listen to others’. At my local grocery store around 6:30 in the evening, it is not an uncommon sight to see a man in business attire, wandering the frozen food aisle, phone in hand, shouting, “Bird’s Eye or Jolly Green Giant? What? Yes, I got the coffee filters already!” How rude, you think, until you remember that you left your own grocery list on the kitchen counter; in a split second you are fishing for your phone so that you can call home and get its particulars. This is the quintessential actor-observer paradox: as actors, we are always politely exercising our right to be connected, but as observers we are perpetually victimized by the boorish bad manners of other cell phone users.
A new generation of sociologists has begun to apply Goffman’s insights to our use of cell phones in public. Kenneth J. Gergen, for example, has argued that one reason cell phones allow a peculiar form of diversion in public spaces is that they encourage “absent presence,” a state where “one is physically present but is absorbed by a technologically mediated world of elsewhere.” You can witness examples of absent presence everywhere: people in line at the bank or a retail store, phones to ear and deep into their own conversations—so unavailable they do not offer the most basic pleasantries to the salesperson or cashier. At my local playground, women deep in cell phone conversations are scattered on benches or distractedly pushing a child on a swing—physically present, to be sure, but “away” in their conversations, not fully engaged with those around them.
The first time you saw a person walking down the street having a conversation using a hands-free cell phone device you intuitively grasped this state. Wildly gesticulating, laughing, mumbling—to the person on the other end of the telephone, their street-walking conversation partner is engaged in normal conversation. To the outside observer, however, he looks like a deranged or slightly addled escapee from a psychiatric ward. Engaged with the ether, hooked up to an earpiece and dangling microphone, his animated voice and gestures are an anomaly in the social space. They violate our everyday sense of normal behavior.
The difficulty of harmonizing real and virtual presence isn’t new. As Mark Caldwell noted in A Short History of Rudeness about the first telephones, “many early phone stories involved a bumpkin who nods silently in reply to a caller’s increasingly agitated, ‘Are you there?’” Even young children know Goffman’s rules. When a parent is in front of a child but on the telephone (physically present but mentally “away”), a child will frequently protest—grabbing for the phone or vocalizing loudly to retrieve the parent’s attention. They are expressing a need for recognition that, in a less direct and individualized way, we all require from strangers in public space. But the challenge is greater given the sheer number of wireless users, a reality that is prompting a new form of social criticism. As a “commentary on the potential of the mobile phone for disrupting and disturbing social interactions,” the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea recently sponsored a project called “Mass Distraction.” The project featured jackets and cell phones that only allowed participants to talk on their phones if the large hood of the jacket was closed completely over their head or if they continued to insert coins into the pocket of the jacket like an old fashioned pay phone. “In order to remain connected,” the project notes, “the mobile phone user multitasks between the two communication channels. Whether disguised or not, this practice degrades the quality of the interaction with the people in his immediate presence.”
Cocooned within our “Personal Area Networks” and wirelessly transported to other spaces, we are becoming increasingly immune to the boundaries and realities of physical space. As one reporter for the Los Angeles Times said, in exasperation, “Go ahead, floss in the elevator. You’re busy; you can’t be expected to wait until you can find a bathroom.... [T]he world out there? It’s just a backdrop, as movable and transient as a fake skyline on a studio lot.” No one is an outsider with a cell phone—that is why foreign cab drivers in places like New York and Washington are openly willing to ignore laws against driving-and-talking. Beyond the psychic benefits cell phone calls provide (cab driving is a lonely occupation), their use signals the cab driver’s membership in a community apart from the ever-changing society that frequents his taxi. Our cell phones become our talismans against being perceived as (or feeling ourselves to be) outsiders.
Talk and Conversation
Recently, on a trip to China, I found myself standing on the Great Wall. One of the members of our small group had hiked ahead, and since the rest of us had decided it was time to get back down the mountain, we realized we would need to find him. Despite being in a remote location at high altitude, and having completely lost sight of him in the hazy late morning air, this proved to be the easiest of logistical tasks. One man pulled out his cell phone, called his wife back in the United States, and had her send an e-mail to the man who had walked ahead. Knowing that our lost companion religiously checked his BlackBerry wireless, we reasoned that he would surely notice an incoming message. Soon enough he reappeared, our wireless plea for his return having successfully traveled from China to Washington and back again to the Wall in mere minutes.
At the time, we were all caught up in the James Bond-like excitement of our mission. Would the cell phone work? (It did.) Would the wife’s e-mail get through to our companion’s BlackBerry? (No problem.) Only later, as we drove back to Beijing, did I experience a pang of doubt about our small communications triumph. There, at one of the Great Wonders of the World, a centuries-old example of human triumph over nature, we didn’t hesitate to do something as mundane as make a cell phone call. It is surely true that wireless communication is its own wondrous triumph over nature. But cell phone conversation somehow inspires less awe than standing atop the Great Wall, perhaps because atop the Great Wall we are still rooted in the natural world that we have conquered. Or perhaps it is simply because cell phones have become everyday wonders—as unremarkable to us as the Great Wall is to those who see it everyday.
Christian Licoppe and Jean-Philippe Heurtin have argued that cell phone use must be understood in a broader context; they note that the central feature of the modern experience is the “deinstitutionalization of personal bonds.” Deinstitutionalization spawns anxiety, and as a result we find ourselves working harder to build trust relationships. Cell phone calls “create a web of short, content-poor interactions through which bonds can be built and strengthened in an ongoing process.”
But as trust is being built and bolstered moment by moment between individuals, public trust among strangers in social settings is eroding. We are strengthening and increasing our interactions with the people we already know at the expense of those who we do not. The result, according to Kenneth Gergen, is “the erosion of face-to-face community, a coherent and centered sense of self, moral bearings, depth of relationship, and the uprooting of meaning from material context: such are the dangers of absent presence.”
No term captures this paradoxical state more ably than the word “roam,” which appears on your phone when you leave an area bristling with wireless towers and go into the wilds of the less well connected. The word appears when your cell phone is looking for a way to connect you, but the real definition of roam is “to go from place to place without purpose or direction,” which has more suggestive implications. It suggests that we have allowed our phones to become the link to our purpose and the symbol of our status—without its signal we lack direction. Roaming was a word whose previous use was largely confined to describing the activities of herds of cattle. In her report on the use of mobile phones throughout the world, Sadie Plant noted, “according to the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the earliest uses of the word ‘mobile’ was in association with the Latin phrase mobile vulgus, the excitable crowd,” whence comes our word “mob.”
Convenience and safety—the two reasons people give for why they have (or “need”) cell phones—are legitimate reasons for using wireless technology; but they are not neutral. Convenience is the major justification for fast food, but its overzealous consumption has something to do with our national obesity “epidemic.” Safety spawned a bewildering range of anti-bacterial products and the overzealous prescription of antibiotics—which in turn led to disease-resistant bacteria.
One possible solution would be to treat cell phone use the way we now treat tobacco use. Public spaces in America were once littered with spittoons and the residue of the chewing tobacco that filled them, despite the disgust the practice fostered. Social norms eventually rendered public spitting déclassé. Similarly, it was not so long ago that cigarette smoking was something people did everywhere—in movie theaters, restaurants, trains, and airplanes. Non-smokers often had a hard time finding refuge from the clouds of nicotine. Today, we ban smoking in all but designated areas. Currently, cell phone users enjoy the same privileges smokers once enjoyed, but there is no reason we cannot reverse the trend. Yale University bans cell phones in some of its libraries, and Amtrak’s introduction of “quiet cars” on some of its routes has been eagerly embraced by commuters. Perhaps one day we will exchange quiet cars for wireless cars, and the majority of public space will revert to the quietly disconnected. In doing so, we might partially reclaim something higher even than healthy lungs: civility.
This reclaiming of social space could have considerable consequences. As sociologist de Gournay has noted, “the telephone is a device ill suited to listening...it is more appropriate for exchanging information.” Considering Americans’ obsession with information—we are, after all, the “information society”—it is useful to draw the distinction. Just as there is a distinction between information and knowledge, there is a vast difference between conversation and talk.
Conversation (as opposed to “talk”) is to genuine sociability what courtship (as opposed to “hooking up”) is to romance. And the technologies that mediate these distinctions are important: the cell phone exchange of information is a distant relative of formal conversation, just as the Internet chat room is a far less compelling place to become intimate with another person than a formal date. In both cases, however, we have convinced ourselves as a culture that these alternatives are just as good as the formalities—that they are, in fact, improvements upon them.
“A conversation has a life of its own and makes demands on its own behalf,” Goffman wrote. “It is a little social system with its own boundary-making tendencies; it is a little patch of commitment and loyalty with its own heroes and its own villains.” According to census data, the percentage of Americans who live alone is the highest it has ever been in our country’s history, making a return to genuine sociability and conversation more important than ever. Cell phones provide us with a new, but not necessarily superior means of communicating with each other. They encourage talk, not conversation. They link us to those we know, but remove us from the strangers who surround us in public space. Our constant accessibility and frequent exchange of information is undeniably useful. But it would be a terrible irony if “being connected” required or encouraged a disconnection from community life—an erosion of the spontaneous encounters and everyday decencies that make society both civilized and tolerable.
Christine Rosen is a senior editor of The New Atlantis and resident fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her book Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement was just published by Oxford University Press.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/our-cell-phones-ourselves
Hell is other people,” Sartre observed, but you need not be a misanthrope or a diminutive French existentialist to have experienced similar feelings during the course of a day. No matter where you live or what you do, in all likelihood you will eventually find yourself participating in that most familiar and exasperating of modern rituals: unwillingly listening to someone else’s cell phone conversation. Like the switchboard operators of times past, we are now all privy to calls being put through, to the details of loved ones contacted, appointments made, arguments aired, and gossip exchanged.
Today, more people have cell phones than fixed telephone lines, both in the United States and internationally. There are more than one billion cell phone users worldwide, and as one wireless industry analyst recently told Slate, “some time between 2010 and 2020, everyone who wants and can afford a cell phone will have one.” Americans spend, on average, about seven hours a month talking on their cell phones. Wireless phones have become such an important part of our everyday lives that in July, the country’s major wireless industry organization featured the following “quick poll” on its website: “If you were stranded on a desert island and could have one thing with you, what would it be?” The choices: “Matches/Lighter,” “Food/Water,” “Another Person,” “Wireless Phone.” The World Health Organization has even launched an “International EMF Project” to study the possible health effects of the electromagnetic fields created by wireless technologies.
But if this ubiquitous technology is now a normal part of life, our adjustment to it has not been without consequences. Especially in the United States, where cell phone use still remains low compared to other countries, we are rapidly approaching a tipping point with this technology. How has it changed our behavior, and how might it continue to do so? What new rules ought we to impose on its use? Most importantly, how has the wireless telephone encouraged us to connect individually but disconnect socially, ceding, in the process, much that was civil and civilized about the use of public space?
Untethered
Connection has long served as a potent sign of power. In the era before cell phones, popular culture served up presidents, tin-pot dictators, and crime bosses who were never far from a prominently placed row of phones, demonstrating their importance at the hub of a vast nexus. Similarly, superheroes always owned special communications devices: Batman had the Batphone, Dick Tracy his wrist-phone, Maxwell Smart his shoe spy phone. (In the Flash comics of the 1940s, the hero simply outraces phone calls as they are made, avoiding altogether the need for special communication devices.) To be able to talk to anyone, at any time, without the mediator of the human messenger and without the messenger’s attendant delays, is a thoroughly modern triumph of human engineering.
In 1983, Motorola introduced DynaTAC, now considered the first truly mobile telephone, and by the end of that year, the first commercial cellular phone systems were being used in Chicago and in the Baltimore/Washington, D.C. area. Nokia launched its own mobile phone, the cumbersome Cityman, in 1987. Americans were introduced to the glamour of mobile telephone communication that same year in a scene from the movie Wall Street. In it, the ruthless Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) self-importantly conducts his business on the beach using a large portable phone. These first-generation cell phones were hardly elegant—many people called them “luggables” rather than “portables,” and as one reporter noted in The Guardian, “mobiles of that era are often compared to bricks, but this is unfair. Bricks are quite attractive and relatively light.” But they made up in symbolic importance what they lacked in style; only the most powerful and wealthiest people owned them. Indeed, in the 1980s, the only other people besides the elite and medical professionals who had mobile technologies at all (such as pagers) were presumed to be using them for nefarious reasons. Who else but a roving drug dealer or prostitute would need to be accessible at all times?
This changed in the 1990s, when cell phones became cheaper, smaller, and more readily available. The technology spread rapidly, as did the various names given to it: in Japan it is keitai, in China it’s sho ji, Germans call their cell phones handy, in France it is le portable or le G, and in Arabic, el mobile, telephone makhmul, or telephone gowal. In countries where cell phone use is still limited to the elite—such as Bulgaria, where only 2.5 percent of the population can afford a cell phone—its power as a symbol of wealth and prestige remains high. But in the rest of the world, it has become a technology for the masses. There were approximately 340,000 wireless subscribers in the United States in 1985, according to the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Associate (CTIA); by 1995, that number had increased to more than 33 million, and by 2003, more than 158 million people in the country had gone wireless.
Why do people use cell phones? The most frequently cited reason is convenience, which can cover a rather wide range of behaviors. Writing in the Wall Street Journal this spring, an executive for a wireless company noted that “in Slovakia, people are using mobile phones to remotely switch on the heat before they return home,” and in Norway, “1.5 million people can confirm their tax returns” using cell phone short text messaging services. Paramedics use camera phones to send ahead to hospitals pictures of the incoming injuries; “in Britain, it is now commonplace for wireless technology to allow companies to remotely access meters or gather diagnostic information.” Construction workers on-site can use cell phones to send pictures to contractors off-site. Combined with the individual use of cell phones—to make appointments, locate a friend, check voicemail messages, or simply to check in at work—cell phones offer people a heretofore unknown level of convenience.
More than ninety percent of cell phone users also report that owning a cell phone makes them feel safer. The CTIA noted that in 2001, nearly 156,000 wireless emergency service calls were made every day—about 108 calls per minute. Technological Good Samaritans place calls to emergency personnel when they see traffic accidents or crimes-in-progress; individuals use their cell phones to call for assistance when a car breaks down or plans go awry. The safety rationale carries a particular poignancy after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. On that day, many men and women used cell phones to speak their final words to family and loved ones. Passengers on hijacked airplanes called wives and husbands; rescue workers on the ground phoned in to report their whereabouts. As land lines in New York and Washington, D.C., became clogged, many of us made or received frantic phone calls on cell phones—to reassure others that we were safe or to make sure that our friends and family were accounted for. Many people who had never considered owning a cell phone bought one after September 11th. If the cultural image we had of the earliest cell phones was of a technology glamorously deployed by the elite, then the image of cell phones today has to include people using them for this final act of communication, as well as terrorists who used cell phones as detonators in the bombing of trains in Madrid.
Of course, the perceived need for a technological safety device can encourage distinctly irrational behavior and create new anxieties. Recently, when a professor at Rutgers University asked his students to experiment with turning off their cell phones for 48 hours, one young woman told University Wire, “I felt like I was going to get raped if I didn’t have my cell phone in my hand. I carry it in case I need to call someone for help.” Popular culture endorses this image of cell-phone-as-life-line. The trailer for a new suspense movie, Cellular, is currently making the rounds in theaters nationwide. In it, an attractive young man is shown doing what young men apparently do with their camera-enabled cell phones: taking pictures of women in bikinis and e-mailing the images to himself. When he receives a random but desperate phone call from a woman who claims to be the victim of a kidnapping, he finds himself drawn into a race to find and save her, all the while trying to maintain that tenuous cell phone connection. It is indicative of our near-fetishistic attachment to our cell phones that we can relate (and treat as a serious moment of suspense) a scene in the movie where the protagonist, desperately trying to locate a cell phone charger before his battery runs out, holds the patrons of an electronics store at gunpoint until the battery is rejuvenated. After scenes of high-speed car chases and large explosions, the trailer closes with a disembodied voice asking the hero, “How did you get involved?” His response? “I just answered my phone.”
Many parents have responded to this perceived need for personal security by purchasing cell phones for their children, but this, too, has had some unintended consequences. One sociologist has noted that parents who do this are implicitly commenting on their own sense of security or insecurity in society. “Claiming to care about their children’s safety,” Chantal de Gournay writes, “parents develop a ‘paranoiac’ vision of the community, reflecting a lack of trust in social institutions and in any environment other than the family.” As a result, they choose surveillance technologies, such as cell phones, to monitor their children, rather than teaching them (and trusting them) to behave appropriately. James E. Katz, a communications professor at Rutgers who has written extensively about wireless communication, argues that parents who give children cell phones are actually weakening the traditional bonds of authority; “parents think they can reach kids any time they want, and thus are more indulgent of their children’s wanderings,” Katz notes. Not surprisingly, “my cell phone battery died” has become a popular excuse among teenagers for failure to check in with their parents. And I suspect nearly everyone, at some point, has suffered hours of panic when a loved one who was supposed to be “reachable” failed to answer the cell phone.
Although cell phones are a technology with broad appeal, we do not all use our cell phones in the same way. In June 2004, Cingular announced that “for the fourth year in a row, men prove to be the more talkative sex in the wireless world,” talking 16 percent more on their phones than women. Women, however, are more likely to use a cell phone “to talk to friends and family” while men use theirs for business—including, evidently, the business of mating. Researchers found that “men are using their mobile phones as peacocks use their immobilizing feathers and male bullfrogs use their immoderate croaks: To advertise to females their worth, status, and desirability,” reported the New York Times. The researchers also discovered that many of the men they observed in pubs and nightclubs carried fake cell phones, likely one of the reasons they titled their paper “Mobile Phones as Lekking Devices Among Human Males,” a lek being a “communal mating area where males gather to engage in flamboyant courtship displays.” Or, as another observer of cell phone behavior succinctly put it: “the mobile is widely used for psychosexual purposes of performance and display.”
The increasingly sophisticated accessories available on cell phones encourage such displays. One new phone hitting the market boasts video capture and playback, a 1.2 megapixel camera, a 256 color screen, speakerphone, removable memory, mp3 player, Internet access, and a global positioning system. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on cell phones that will feature radios, calculators, alarm clocks, flashlights, and mirrored compacts. Phones are “becoming your Swiss army knife,” one product developer enthused. Hyperactive peacocking will also be abetted by the new walkie-talkie function available on many phones, which draws further attention to the user by broadcasting to anyone within hearing distance the conversation of the person on the other end of the phone.
With all these accoutrements, it is not surprising that one contributor to a discussion list about wireless technology recently compared cell phones and BlackBerrys to “electronic pets.” Speaking to a group of business people, he reported, “you constantly see people taking their little pets out and stroking the scroll wheel, coddling them, basically ‘petting’ them.” When confined to a basement conference room, he found that participants “were compelled to ‘walk’ their electronic pets on breaks” to check their messages. In parts of Asia, young women carry their phones in decorated pouches, worn like necklaces, or in pants with specially designed pockets that keep the phone within easy reach. We have become thigmophilic with our technology—touch-loving—a trait we share with rats, as it happens. We are constantly taking them out, fiddling with them, putting them away, taking them out again, reprogramming their directories, text messaging. And cell phone makers are always searching for new ways to exploit our attachments. Nokia offers “expression” phones that allow customization of faceplates and ring tones. Many companies, such as Modtones, sell song samples for cell phone ringers. In Asia, where cell phone use among the young is especially high, companies offer popular anime and manga cartoons as downloadable “wallpaper” for cell phones.
Cell phone technology is also creating new forms of social and political networking. “Moblogging,” or mobile web logging, allows cell phone users to publish and update content to the World Wide Web. An increasing number of companies are offering cell phones with WiFi capability, and as Sadie Plant noted recently in a report she prepared for Motorola, “On the Mobile,” “today, the smallest Motorola phone has as much computing power in it as the largest, most expensive computer did less than a generation ago.” In his Forbes “Wireless Outlook” newsletter, Andrew Seybold predicted, “in twenty five years there aren’t going to be any wired phones left and I think it might happen even much sooner than that—ten to fifteen years.” As well, “the phone will be tied much more closely to the person. Since the phone is the person, the person will be the number.” It isn’t surprising that one of Seybold’s favorite movies is the James Coburn paranoid comedy, The President’s Analyst (1967), whose premise “centered on attempts by the phone company to capture the president’s psychoanalyst in order to further a plot to have phone devices implanted in people’s brains at birth.” Ma Bell meets The Manchurian Candidate.
Dodgeball.com, a new social-networking service, applies the principles of websites such as Friendster to cell phones. “Tell us where you are and we’ll tell you who and what is around you,” Dodgeball promises. “We’ll ping your friends with your whereabouts, let you know when friends-of-friends are within ten blocks, allow you to broadcast content to anyone within ten blocks of you or blast messages to your groups of friends.” The service is now available in fifteen cities in the U.S., enabling a form of friendly pseudo-stalking. “I was at Welcome to the Johnson’s and a girl came up behind me and gave a tap on the shoulder,” one recent testimonial noted. “‘Are you this guy?’ she inquired while holding up her cell phone to show my Dodgeball photo. I was indeed.”
Political organizers have also found cell phone technology to be a valuable tool. Throughout 2000 in the Philippines, the country’s many cell phone users were text-messaging derogatory slogans and commentary about then-President Joseph Estrada. With pressure on the Estrada administration mounting, activists organized large demonstrations against the president by activating cell phone “trees” to summon protesters to particular locations and to outmaneuver riot police. Estrada was forced from office in January 2001. Anti-globalization protesters in Seattle and elsewhere (using only non-corporate cell phones, surely) have employed the technology to stage and control movements during demonstrations.
Communication Delinquents
The ease of mobile communication does not guarantee positive results for all those who use it, of course, and the list of unintended negative consequences from cell phone use continues to grow. The BBC world service reported in 2001, “senior Islamic figures in Singapore have ruled that Muslim men cannot divorce their wives by sending text messages over their mobile phones.” (Muslims can divorce their wives by saying the word “talaq,” which means “I divorce you,” three times).
Concerns about the dangers of cell phone use while driving have dominated public discussion of cell phone risks. A 2001 study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that “54 percent of drivers ‘usually’ have some type of wireless phone in their vehicle with them” and that this translates into approximately 600,000 drivers “actively using cell phones at any one time” on the road. Women and drivers in the suburbs were found to talk and drive more often, and “the highest national use rates were observed for drivers of vans and sport utility vehicles.” New York, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C. all require drivers to use hands-free technology (headsets or speakerphones) when talking on the cell.
Cell phones can also play host to viruses, real and virtual. A 2003 study presented at the American Society for Microbiology’s conference on infectious disease found that twelve percent of the cell phones used by medical personnel in an Israeli hospital were contaminated with bacteria. (Another recent cell phone-related health research result, purporting a link between cell phone use and decreased sperm counts, has been deemed inconclusive.) The first computer virus specifically targeting cell phones was found in late June. As The Guardian reported recently, anti-virus manufacturers believe that “the mobile phone now mirrors how the Net has developed over the past two or three years—blighted with viruses as people got faster connections and downloaded more information.”
With technology comes addiction, and applicable neologisms have entered the lexicon—such as “crackberry,” which describes the dependence exhibited by some BlackBerry wireless users. In a 2001 article in New York magazine about feuding couples, one dueling duo, Dave and Brooke, traded barbs about her wireless addictions. “I use it when I’m walking down the street,” Brooke said proudly. “She was checking her voice mail in the middle of a Seder!” was Dave’s exasperated response. “Under the table!” Brooke clarified. A recent survey conducted by the Hospital of Seoul National University found that “3 out of 10 Korean high school students who carry mobile phones are reported to be addicted” to them. Many reported feeling anxious without their phones and many displayed symptoms of repetitive stress injury from obsessive text messaging.
The cell phone has also proven effective as a facilitator and alibi for adulterous behavior. “I heard someone (honest) talking about their ‘shag phone’ the other day,” a visitor to a wireless technology blog recently noted. “He was a married man having an affair with a lady who was also married. It seems that one of the first heady rituals of the affair was to purchase a ‘his and her’ pair of pre-pay shag phones.” A recent story in the New York Times documented the use of cell phone “alibi and excuse clubs” that function as an ethically challenged form of networking—Dodgeball for the delinquent. “Cell phone-based alibi clubs, which have sprung up in the United States, Europe, and Asia, allow people to send out mass text messages to thousands of potential collaborators asking for help. When a willing helper responds, the sender and the helper devise a lie, and the helper then calls the victim with the excuse,” the report noted. One woman who started her own alibi club, which has helped spouses cheat on each other and workers mislead their bosses, “said she was not terribly concerned about lying,” although she did concede: “You wouldn’t really want your friends to know you’re sparing people’s feelings with these white lies.” Websites such as Kargo offer features like “Soundster,” which allows users to “insert sounds into your call and control your environment.” Car horns, sirens, the coughs and sniffles of the sick room—all can be simulated in order to fool the listener on the other end of the call. Technology, it seems, is allowing people to make instrumental use of anonymous strangers while maintaining the appearance of trustworthiness within their own social group.
Technology has also led to further incursions on personal privacy. Several websites now offer “candid pornography,” peeping-Tom pictures taken in locker rooms, bathrooms, and dressing rooms by unscrupulous owners of cell phone cameras. Camera phones pose a potentially daunting challenge to privacy and security; unlike old-fashioned cameras, which could be confiscated and the film destroyed, digital cameras, including those on cell phones, allow users to send images instantaneously to any e-mail address. The images can be stored indefinitely, and the evidence that a picture was ever taken can be destroyed.
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
Certain public interactions carry with them certain unspoken rules of behavior. When approaching a grocery store checkout line, you queue behind the last person in line and wait your turn. On the subway, you make way for passengers entering and exiting the cars. Riding on the train, you expect the interruptions of the ticket taker and the periodic crackling blare of station announcements. What you never used to expect, but must now endure, is the auditory abrasion of a stranger arguing about how much he does, indeed, owe to his landlord. I’ve heard business deals, lovers’ quarrels, and the most unsavory gossip. I’ve listened to strangers discuss in excruciating detail their own and others’ embarrassing medical conditions; I’ve heard the details of recent real estate purchases, job triumphs, and awful dates. (The only thing I haven’t heard is phone sex, but perhaps it is only a matter of time.) We are no longer overhearing, which implies accidentally stumbling upon a situation where two people are talking in presumed privacy. Now we are all simply hearing. The result is a world where social space is overtaken by anonymous, unavoidable background noise—a quotidian narration that even in its more interesting moments rarely rises above the tone of a penny dreadful. It seems almost cruel, in this context, that Motorola’s trademarked slogan for its wireless products is “Intelligence Everywhere.”
Why do these cell phone conversations bother us more than listening to two strangers chatter in person about their evening plans or listening to a parent scold a recalcitrant child? Those conversations are quantitatively greater, since we hear both sides of the discussion—so why are they nevertheless experienced as qualitatively different? Perhaps it is because cell phone users harbor illusions about being alone or assume a degree of privacy that the circumstances don’t actually allow. Because cell phone talkers are not interacting with the world around them, they come to believe that the world around them isn’t really there and surely shouldn’t intrude. And when the cell phone user commandeers the space by talking, he or she sends a very clear message to others that they are powerless to insist on their own use of the space. It is a passive-aggressive but extremely effective tactic.
Such encounters can sometimes escalate into rude intransigence or even violence. In the past few years alone, men and women have been stabbed, escorted off of airplanes by federal marshals, pepper-sprayed in movie theaters, ejected from concert halls, and deliberately rammed with cars as a result of their bad behavior on their cell phones. The Zagat restaurant guide reports that cell phone rudeness is now the number one complaint of diners, and USA Today notes that “fifty-nine percent of people would rather visit the dentist than sit next to someone using a cell phone.”
The etiquette challenges posed by cell phones are universal, although different countries have responded in slightly different ways. Writing about the impact of cell phone technology in The Guardian in 2002, James Meek noted, with moderate horror, that cell phones now encourage British people to do what “British people aren’t supposed to do: invite strangers, spontaneously, into our personal worlds. We let everyone know what our accent is, what we do for a living, what kind of stuff we do in our non-working hours.” In France, cell phone companies were pressured by the public to censor the last four digits of phone numbers appearing on monthly statements, because so many French men and women were using them to confirm that their significant other was having an affair.
In Israel, where the average person is on a cell phone four times as much as the average American, and where cell phone technology boasts an impressive 76 percent penetration rate (the United States isn’t projected to reach that level until 2009), the incursion of cell phones into daily life is even more dramatic. As sociologists Amit Schejter and Akiba Cohen found, there were no less than ten cell phone interruptions during a recent staging of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at Israel’s National Theater, and “there has even been an anecdote reported of an undertaker’s phone ringing inside a grave as the deceased was being put to rest.” The authors explain this state of affairs with reference to the Israeli personality, which they judge to be more enthusiastic about technology and more forceful in exerting itself in public; the subtitle of their article is “chutzpah and chatter in the Holy Land.”
In the U.S., mild regional differences in the use of cell phones are evident. Reporting on a survey by Cingular wireless, CNN noted that cell phone users in the South “are more likely to silence their phones in church,” while Westerners “are most likely to turn a phone off in libraries, theaters, restaurants, and schools.” But nationwide, cell phones still frequently interrupt movie screenings, theater performances, and concerts. Audience members are not the sole offenders, either. My sister, a professional musician, told me that during one performance, in the midst of a slow and quiet passage of Verdi’s Requiem, the cell phone of one of the string players in the orchestra began ringing, much to the horror of his fellow musicians.
We cannot simply banish to Tartarus—the section of Hades reserved for punishment of the worst offenders—all those who violate the rules of social space. And the noise pollution generated by rude cell phone users is hardly the worst violation of social order; it is not the same as defacing a statue, for example. Other countries offer some reason for optimism: In societies that maintain more formality, such as Japan, loud public conversation is considered rude, and Japanese people will often cover their mouths and hide their phones from view when speaking into them.
Not surprisingly, Americans have turned to that most hallowed but least effective solution to social problems: public education. Cingular Wireless, for example, has launched a public awareness campaign whose slogan is “Be Sensible.” The program includes an advertisement shown in movie theaters about “Inconsiderate Cell Phone Guy,” a parody of bad behavior that shows a man talking loudly into his cell phone at inappropriate times: during a date, in a movie, at a wedding, in the middle of a group therapy session. It is a miniature manners nickelodeon for the wireless age. July is now officially National Cell Phone Courtesy Month, and etiquette experts such as Jacqueline Whitmore of the Protocol School of Palm Beach advise companies such as Sprint about how to encourage better behavior in their subscribers. Whitmore is relentlessly positive: “Wireless technology is booming so quickly and wireless phones have become so popular, the rules on wireless etiquette are still evolving,” she notes on her website. She cites hopeful statistics culled from public opinion surveys that say “98 percent of Americans say they move away from others when talking on a wireless phone in public” and “the vast majority (86 percent) say they ‘never’ or ‘rarely’ speak on wireless phones while conducting an entire public transaction with someone else such as a sales clerk or bank teller.” If you are wondering where these examples of wireless rectitude reside, you might find them in the land of wishful thinking. There appears to be a rather large disconnect between people’s actual behavior and their reports of their behavior.
Whitmore is correct to suggest that we are in the midst of a period of adjustment. We still have the memory of the old social rules, which remind us to be courteous towards others, especially in confined environments such as trains and elevators. But it is becoming increasingly clear that cell phone technology itself has disrupted our ability to insist on the enforcement of social rules. Etiquette experts urge us to adjust—be polite, don’t return boorish behavior with boorish behavior, set a standard of probity in your own use of cell phones. But in doing so these experts tacitly concede that every conversation is important, and that we need only learn how and when to have them. This elides an older rule: when a conversation takes place in public, its merit must be judged in part by the standards of the other participants in the social situation. By relying solely on self-discipline and public education (or that ubiquitous modern state of “awareness”), the etiquette experts have given us a doomed manual. Human nature being what it is, individuals will spend more time rationalizing their own need to make cell phone calls than thinking about how that need might affect others. Worse, the etiquette experts offer diversions rather than standards, encouraging alternatives to calling that nevertheless still succeed in removing people from the social space. “Use text messaging,” is number 7 on Whitmore’s Ten Tips for the Cell Phone Savvy.
These attempts at etiquette training also evade another reality: the decline of accepted standards for social behavior. In each of us lurks the possibility of a Jekyll-and-Hyde-like transformation, its trigger the imposition of some arbitrary rule. The problem is that, in the twenty-first century, with the breakdown of hierarchies and manners, all social rules are arbitrary. “I don’t think we have to worry about people being rude intentionally,” Whitmore told Wireless Week. “Most of us simply haven’t come to grips with the new responsibilities wireless technologies demand.” But this seems foolishly optimistic. A psychologist quoted in a story by UPI recently noted the “baffling sense of entitlement” demonstrated by citizens in the wireless world. “They don’t get sheepish when shushed,” he marveled. “You’re the rude one.” And contra Ms. Whitmore, there is intention at work in this behavior, even if it is not intentional rudeness. It is the intentional removal of oneself from the social situation in public space. This removal, as sociologists have long shown, is something more serious than a mere manners lapse. It amounts to a radical disengagement from the public sphere.
Spectator Sport
We know that the reasons people give for owning cell phones are largely practical—convenience and safety. But the reason we answer them whenever they ring is a question better left to sociology and psychology. In works such as Behavior in Public Spaces, Relations in Public, and Interaction Ritual, the great sociologist Erving Goffman mapped the myriad possibilities of human interaction in social space, and his observations take on a new relevance in our cell phone world. Crucial to Goffman’s analysis was the notion that in social situations where strangers must interact, “the individual is obliged to ‘come into play’ upon entering the situation and to stay ‘in play’ while in the situation.” Failure to demonstrate this presence sends a clear message to others of one’s hostility or disrespect for the social gathering. It effectively turns them into “non-persons.” Like the piqued lover who rebuffs her partner’s attempt to caress her, the person who removes himself from the social situation is sending a clear message to those around him: I don’t need you.
Although Goffman wrote in the era before cell phones, he might have judged their use as a “subordinate activity,” a way to pass the time such as reading or doodling that could and should be set aside when the dominant activity resumes. Within social space, we are allowed to perform a range of these secondary activities, but they must not impose upon the social group as a whole or require so much attention that they remove us from the social situation altogether. The opposite appears to be true today. The group is expected never to impinge upon—indeed, it is expected to tacitly endorse by enduring—the individual’s right to withdraw from social space by whatever means he or she chooses: cell phones, BlackBerrys, iPods, DVDs screened on laptop computers. These devices are all used as a means to refuse to be “in” the social space; they are technological cold shoulders that are worse than older forms of subordinate activity in that they impose visually and auditorily on others. Cell phones are not the only culprits here. A member of my family, traveling recently on the Amtrak train from New York, was shocked to realize that the man sitting in front of her was watching a pornographic movie on his laptop computer—a movie whose raunchy scenes were reflected in the train window and thus clearly visible to her. We have allowed what should be subordinate activities in social space to become dominant.
One of the groups Goffman studied keenly were mental patients, many of them residents at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., and his comparisons often draw on the remarkable disconnect between the behavior of people in normal society and those who had been institutionalized for mental illness. It is striking in revisiting Goffman’s work how often people who use cell phones seem to be acting more like the people in the asylum than the ones in respectable society. Goffman describes “occult involvements,” for example, as any activity that undermines others’ ability to feel engaged in social space. “When an individual is perceived in an occult involvement, observers may not only sense that they are not able to claim him at the moment,” Goffman notes, “but also feel that the offender’s complete activity up till then has been falsely taken as a sign of participation with them, that all along he has been alienated from their world.” Who hasn’t observed someone sitting quietly, apparently observing the rules of social space, only to launch into loud conversation as soon as the cell phone rings? This is the pretense of social participation Goffman observed in patients at St. Elizabeth’s.
Goffman called those who declined to respond to social overtures as being “out of contact,” and said “this state is often felt to be full evidence that he is very sick indeed, that he is, in fact, cut off from all contact with the world around him.” To be accessible meant to be available in the particular social setting and to act appropriately. Today, of course, being accessible means answering your cell phone, which brings you in contact with your caller, but “out of contact” in the physical social situation, be it a crosstown bus, a train, an airplane, or simply walking down the street.
In terms of the rules of social space, cell phone use is a form of communications panhandling—forcing our conversations on others without first gaining their tacit approval. “The force that keeps people in their communication place in our middle-class society,” Goffman observed, “seems to be the fear of being thought forward and pushy, or odd, the fear of forcing a relationship where none is desired.” But middle class society itself has decided to upend such conventions in the service of greater accessibility and convenience. This is a dramatic shift that took place in a very short span of time, and it is worth at least considering the long-term implications of this subversion of norms. The behavioral rules Goffman so effectively mapped exist to protect everyone, even if we don’t, individually, always need them. They are the social equivalent of fire extinguishers placed throughout public buildings. You hope not to have to use them too often, but they can ensure that a mere spark does not become an embarrassing conflagration. In a world that eschews such norms, we find ourselves plagued by the behavior that Goffman used to witness only among the denizens of the asylum: disembodied talk that renders all of us unwilling listeners.
We also use our cell phones to exert our status in social space, like the remnants of the entourage or train, which “led a worthy to demonstrate his status by the cluster of dependent supporters that accompanied him through a town or a house of parliament.” Modern celebrities still have such escorts (a new cable television series, Entourage, tracks a fictional celebrity posse). But cell phones give all of us the unusual ability to simulate an entourage. My mother-in-law recently found herself sharing an elevator (in the apartment building she’s lived in for forty years) with a man who was speaking very loudly into his cell phone. When she asked him to keep his voice down, he became enraged and began yelling at her; he was, he said, in the midst of an “important” conversation with his secretary. He acted, in other words, as if she’d trounced on the hem of his royal train. She might have had a secretary too, of course—for all he knew she might have a fleet of assistants at her disposal—but because she wasn’t communicating with someone at that moment and he, thanks to his cell phone, was, her status in the social space was, in effect, demoted.
The language of wireless technology itself suggests its selfishness as a medium. One of the latest advances is the “Personal Area Network,” a Bluetooth technology used in Palm Pilots and other personal digital assistants. The network is individualized, closed to unwelcome intruders, and totally dependent on the choices of the user. We now have our own technological assistants and networks, quite an impressive kingdom for ordinary mortals. In this kingdom, our cell phones reassure us by providing constant contact, and we become much like a child with a security blanket or Dumbo with his feather. Like a security blanket, which is also visible to observers, cell phones provide the “‘publicization’ of emotional fulfillment,” as French sociologist Chantal de Gournay has argued. “At work, in town, while traveling—every call on the mobile phone secretly expresses a message to the public: ‘Look how much I’m in demand, how full my life is.’” Unlike those transitional objects of childhood, however, few of us are eager to shed our cell phones.
Absent Without Leave
Our daily interactions with cell phone users often prompt heated exchanges and promises of furious retribution. When New York Times columnist Joe Sharkey asked readers to send in their cell phone horror stories, he was deluged with responses: “There is not enough time in the day to relay the daily torment I must endure from these cell-yellers,” one woman said. “There’s always some self-important jerk who must holler his business all the way into Manhattan,” another commuter wearily noted. Rarely does one find a positive story about cell phone users who behaved politely, observing the common social space.
Then again, we all apparently have a cell phone alter idem, a second self that we endlessly excuse for making just such annoying cell phone calls. As a society, we are endlessly forgiving of our own personal “emergencies” that require cell phone conversation and easily apoplectic about having to listen to others’. At my local grocery store around 6:30 in the evening, it is not an uncommon sight to see a man in business attire, wandering the frozen food aisle, phone in hand, shouting, “Bird’s Eye or Jolly Green Giant? What? Yes, I got the coffee filters already!” How rude, you think, until you remember that you left your own grocery list on the kitchen counter; in a split second you are fishing for your phone so that you can call home and get its particulars. This is the quintessential actor-observer paradox: as actors, we are always politely exercising our right to be connected, but as observers we are perpetually victimized by the boorish bad manners of other cell phone users.
A new generation of sociologists has begun to apply Goffman’s insights to our use of cell phones in public. Kenneth J. Gergen, for example, has argued that one reason cell phones allow a peculiar form of diversion in public spaces is that they encourage “absent presence,” a state where “one is physically present but is absorbed by a technologically mediated world of elsewhere.” You can witness examples of absent presence everywhere: people in line at the bank or a retail store, phones to ear and deep into their own conversations—so unavailable they do not offer the most basic pleasantries to the salesperson or cashier. At my local playground, women deep in cell phone conversations are scattered on benches or distractedly pushing a child on a swing—physically present, to be sure, but “away” in their conversations, not fully engaged with those around them.
The first time you saw a person walking down the street having a conversation using a hands-free cell phone device you intuitively grasped this state. Wildly gesticulating, laughing, mumbling—to the person on the other end of the telephone, their street-walking conversation partner is engaged in normal conversation. To the outside observer, however, he looks like a deranged or slightly addled escapee from a psychiatric ward. Engaged with the ether, hooked up to an earpiece and dangling microphone, his animated voice and gestures are an anomaly in the social space. They violate our everyday sense of normal behavior.
The difficulty of harmonizing real and virtual presence isn’t new. As Mark Caldwell noted in A Short History of Rudeness about the first telephones, “many early phone stories involved a bumpkin who nods silently in reply to a caller’s increasingly agitated, ‘Are you there?’” Even young children know Goffman’s rules. When a parent is in front of a child but on the telephone (physically present but mentally “away”), a child will frequently protest—grabbing for the phone or vocalizing loudly to retrieve the parent’s attention. They are expressing a need for recognition that, in a less direct and individualized way, we all require from strangers in public space. But the challenge is greater given the sheer number of wireless users, a reality that is prompting a new form of social criticism. As a “commentary on the potential of the mobile phone for disrupting and disturbing social interactions,” the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea recently sponsored a project called “Mass Distraction.” The project featured jackets and cell phones that only allowed participants to talk on their phones if the large hood of the jacket was closed completely over their head or if they continued to insert coins into the pocket of the jacket like an old fashioned pay phone. “In order to remain connected,” the project notes, “the mobile phone user multitasks between the two communication channels. Whether disguised or not, this practice degrades the quality of the interaction with the people in his immediate presence.”
Cocooned within our “Personal Area Networks” and wirelessly transported to other spaces, we are becoming increasingly immune to the boundaries and realities of physical space. As one reporter for the Los Angeles Times said, in exasperation, “Go ahead, floss in the elevator. You’re busy; you can’t be expected to wait until you can find a bathroom.... [T]he world out there? It’s just a backdrop, as movable and transient as a fake skyline on a studio lot.” No one is an outsider with a cell phone—that is why foreign cab drivers in places like New York and Washington are openly willing to ignore laws against driving-and-talking. Beyond the psychic benefits cell phone calls provide (cab driving is a lonely occupation), their use signals the cab driver’s membership in a community apart from the ever-changing society that frequents his taxi. Our cell phones become our talismans against being perceived as (or feeling ourselves to be) outsiders.
Talk and Conversation
Recently, on a trip to China, I found myself standing on the Great Wall. One of the members of our small group had hiked ahead, and since the rest of us had decided it was time to get back down the mountain, we realized we would need to find him. Despite being in a remote location at high altitude, and having completely lost sight of him in the hazy late morning air, this proved to be the easiest of logistical tasks. One man pulled out his cell phone, called his wife back in the United States, and had her send an e-mail to the man who had walked ahead. Knowing that our lost companion religiously checked his BlackBerry wireless, we reasoned that he would surely notice an incoming message. Soon enough he reappeared, our wireless plea for his return having successfully traveled from China to Washington and back again to the Wall in mere minutes.
At the time, we were all caught up in the James Bond-like excitement of our mission. Would the cell phone work? (It did.) Would the wife’s e-mail get through to our companion’s BlackBerry? (No problem.) Only later, as we drove back to Beijing, did I experience a pang of doubt about our small communications triumph. There, at one of the Great Wonders of the World, a centuries-old example of human triumph over nature, we didn’t hesitate to do something as mundane as make a cell phone call. It is surely true that wireless communication is its own wondrous triumph over nature. But cell phone conversation somehow inspires less awe than standing atop the Great Wall, perhaps because atop the Great Wall we are still rooted in the natural world that we have conquered. Or perhaps it is simply because cell phones have become everyday wonders—as unremarkable to us as the Great Wall is to those who see it everyday.
Christian Licoppe and Jean-Philippe Heurtin have argued that cell phone use must be understood in a broader context; they note that the central feature of the modern experience is the “deinstitutionalization of personal bonds.” Deinstitutionalization spawns anxiety, and as a result we find ourselves working harder to build trust relationships. Cell phone calls “create a web of short, content-poor interactions through which bonds can be built and strengthened in an ongoing process.”
But as trust is being built and bolstered moment by moment between individuals, public trust among strangers in social settings is eroding. We are strengthening and increasing our interactions with the people we already know at the expense of those who we do not. The result, according to Kenneth Gergen, is “the erosion of face-to-face community, a coherent and centered sense of self, moral bearings, depth of relationship, and the uprooting of meaning from material context: such are the dangers of absent presence.”
No term captures this paradoxical state more ably than the word “roam,” which appears on your phone when you leave an area bristling with wireless towers and go into the wilds of the less well connected. The word appears when your cell phone is looking for a way to connect you, but the real definition of roam is “to go from place to place without purpose or direction,” which has more suggestive implications. It suggests that we have allowed our phones to become the link to our purpose and the symbol of our status—without its signal we lack direction. Roaming was a word whose previous use was largely confined to describing the activities of herds of cattle. In her report on the use of mobile phones throughout the world, Sadie Plant noted, “according to the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the earliest uses of the word ‘mobile’ was in association with the Latin phrase mobile vulgus, the excitable crowd,” whence comes our word “mob.”
Convenience and safety—the two reasons people give for why they have (or “need”) cell phones—are legitimate reasons for using wireless technology; but they are not neutral. Convenience is the major justification for fast food, but its overzealous consumption has something to do with our national obesity “epidemic.” Safety spawned a bewildering range of anti-bacterial products and the overzealous prescription of antibiotics—which in turn led to disease-resistant bacteria.
One possible solution would be to treat cell phone use the way we now treat tobacco use. Public spaces in America were once littered with spittoons and the residue of the chewing tobacco that filled them, despite the disgust the practice fostered. Social norms eventually rendered public spitting déclassé. Similarly, it was not so long ago that cigarette smoking was something people did everywhere—in movie theaters, restaurants, trains, and airplanes. Non-smokers often had a hard time finding refuge from the clouds of nicotine. Today, we ban smoking in all but designated areas. Currently, cell phone users enjoy the same privileges smokers once enjoyed, but there is no reason we cannot reverse the trend. Yale University bans cell phones in some of its libraries, and Amtrak’s introduction of “quiet cars” on some of its routes has been eagerly embraced by commuters. Perhaps one day we will exchange quiet cars for wireless cars, and the majority of public space will revert to the quietly disconnected. In doing so, we might partially reclaim something higher even than healthy lungs: civility.
This reclaiming of social space could have considerable consequences. As sociologist de Gournay has noted, “the telephone is a device ill suited to listening...it is more appropriate for exchanging information.” Considering Americans’ obsession with information—we are, after all, the “information society”—it is useful to draw the distinction. Just as there is a distinction between information and knowledge, there is a vast difference between conversation and talk.
Conversation (as opposed to “talk”) is to genuine sociability what courtship (as opposed to “hooking up”) is to romance. And the technologies that mediate these distinctions are important: the cell phone exchange of information is a distant relative of formal conversation, just as the Internet chat room is a far less compelling place to become intimate with another person than a formal date. In both cases, however, we have convinced ourselves as a culture that these alternatives are just as good as the formalities—that they are, in fact, improvements upon them.
“A conversation has a life of its own and makes demands on its own behalf,” Goffman wrote. “It is a little social system with its own boundary-making tendencies; it is a little patch of commitment and loyalty with its own heroes and its own villains.” According to census data, the percentage of Americans who live alone is the highest it has ever been in our country’s history, making a return to genuine sociability and conversation more important than ever. Cell phones provide us with a new, but not necessarily superior means of communicating with each other. They encourage talk, not conversation. They link us to those we know, but remove us from the strangers who surround us in public space. Our constant accessibility and frequent exchange of information is undeniably useful. But it would be a terrible irony if “being connected” required or encouraged a disconnection from community life—an erosion of the spontaneous encounters and everyday decencies that make society both civilized and tolerable.
Christine Rosen is a senior editor of The New Atlantis and resident fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her book Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement was just published by Oxford University Press.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/our-cell-phones-ourselves
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Youth Culture and New Technologies
We live today in an ever-increasingly hyper-interconnected world, a global society of communicative interactions and exchanges that stimulates profound cultural transformations and realignments; a society epitomised by the advent of globalisation paralleled by the arrival of new technologies. The global village, coined in the 1960's (Breit, 2001, p.214), has come to represent and perhaps link technological progress with better global human relations that in turn has unearthed and defined a specific youth culture. In essence, the changing global media landscape – the arrival of a powerful global media-driven culture – is shaping the socialisation processes, values, and beliefs of young people, and influencing young people’s decisions, in areas such as educational choice, employment, leisure, and life in general.
New technologies offer a culture of information, pleasure and relative autonomy, all of which are of particular appeal to society's youth. This has implications not only for young people themselves but also for their relationships within the family and between generations. The advent of globalisation has meant, for many young people, the sphere of experience has become global and local at once. Young people are often among the first to take advantage of their introduction. Subsequently, the challenge is to give culturally valid meaning to the use of new technologies.
New technologies have continued to make significant inroads into the inner workings of society, this holds true for youth as well. "As new technology becomes increasingly embedded in everyday niches, it is common for youth to interact with dozens of digital devices throughout a typical day, and many spend hour-upon-hour learning about and manipulating computer devices such as laptop computers, handheld computers, game consoles, cell phones, pagers, and audio players" (Bell, 2005).
Contents
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* 1 History of Youth Culture and New Technologies
* 2 The importance of youth culture and new technologies
* 3 Central Issues
* 4 Related Issues
* 5 Further Information
o 5.1 See Also:
o 5.2 Reference
o 5.3 Contributors to This Entry Include:
History of Youth Culture and New Technologies
The concept of youth culture and new technologies is a relatively new term, however the rate at which technology has moved into the lives of the young as stated by Seel (1997, p.2) 'is historically unprecedented’. Growth within this area began in August 1981 when IBM released the IBM PC (personal computer) (Bellis, 2005). From here the industry continued to grow with Apple in 1983 releasing ‘Lisa’ their then latest project. ‘Lisa’ contained many ground-breaking functions such as a mouse, drop down menus, icons, folders, windows and copy and paste abilities among other features (Bellis, 2005).
Following the establishment of home PC's the 1980's also bought with it the introduction of video games; items which were soon to dominate the toy market. Video games were one of the first mediums to combine visuals and active participation for children and youths, as defined by the Wikipedia, they are a form interactive multimedia used as entertainment (Wikimedia, 1997).
As stated in Seel (1997, p.3) by 1989 out of 20 of the best selling toys on the market 16 were video games or video-game-related. The next major development following this was the internet, which was established in the 1990’s. It has been described as the combination of “the interactivity of video games, the information of computers, and the images of MTV�? and thus the internet “created an entirely new means of social interaction�? (Seel, 1997, p.5).
In countries where there are high rates of boradband connectivity many of their youth are able to play online games together. The players are not physically located in the space, they are often involed in socialising together by connecting domestic spaces and time zones through online gaming communities. These activities can have a large impact on the broader youth culture (Flew, 2005, pp.108-109).
Presently computers, the internet, mobile phones, television and VCR’s are competing with one and other in the ever growing electronic arena (Seel, 1997, p.2). More recently as a result of considerable technological advances there has been the convergence of individual technologies. An example of this is the convergence of mobile phone technologies with that of the internet. Young people today can now communicate to other youths around the world as well as access information from the internet via their mobile phone.
The importance of youth culture and new technologies
According to Roy Morgan Research, almost 80 per cent of Australians aged 14-24 access the internet at least once a month, more than a third said they cannot live without a mobile phone and 44 per cent believed computers and technology have given them more control over their lives (Aust. Youth Facts and Stats 2005). The networked generation’s trend towards online activities and interactive media has also resulted in a dramatic decline in traditional activities such as newspaper readership. More than half of all Australians aged 18-29 read the newspaper 30 years ago, now the figure barely tops 20 per cent (AYFS 2005). The digital revolution means the world is literally at your fingertips.
New media technologies are increasingly becoming more than just a simple way to pass the time. In fact, some academics suggest that technology is at the very cultural heart of the current generation of young people. “For the new culture, a trip into virtual reality is far more significant than remembering Proust,�? (Kelly, 1998). Technology, such as the internet, mobile phones, PDA’s and iPods to name a bare few, provide young people with unlimited access to opportunity. It has revolutionised the way we communicate and interact with each other. “Technology generates opportunities: new things to explain; new ways of expression; new media of communications; and creates new forms of destruction,�? (Kelly, 1998).
Young people’s access to new technologies at home, at school, in the work place, even at the local McDonald’s restaurant, allows for constant connectivity to the networked world. Youth are plugged into every possible outlet, 100 per cent of the time, partly because they want to be and partly because they need to be in order to be competitive and play participatory role in today’s world. As youth use the new technologies, they produce the substance of every day and making the meaning of their culture (Trend, 1997).
However, the technical and social convergence brought about as a result of developments in technology is already creating interaction problems, in particular in the younger users. Cyberbullying is a disturbing new trend among young people abusing the technology. The implication is that in an arena where the law is largely not applicable, socially agreed upon values and boundaries must be upheld and respected in order for us to make full use of the technology available.
Central Issues
New technologies have had an influencing impact within society, affecting the way in which people, largely the younger populace, interact, socialize and work. Though since the introduction of new technologies there has been many issues that have arisen by the public and the scholars as to the impact new technologies has over youths of society.
One of the key issues that have arisen from youth culture and new technologies is the growing dependency of such technologies as the Internet among the youth of society. Arguments have arisen over the addiction and over reliance some youths have towards new technologies especially the Internet and the various online communities it provides, particularly online chat and online gaming programs. Among the issues that have been addressed are the adverse impacts of Cyberspace addiction, and the displacement between reality and virtual reality, and its impacts on real world social relationships, Health and communication skills. Further more issues have stirred over privacy issues of Internet content as well as the unrestricted filtering of information that youths are able to gain access to.
New technologies have over time branched into the various spheres in society and have been implicated within the educational systems of many nations. The development of technologies and the innovation of communication tools have enhanced various learning aspects. Advancements in particular ICT’s have improved the standards of vocational education and Distance_Education for youth within various sections of the globe. “ICT crept through the side door into education with promises of time saving, efficiency and improvements in learning�? (Kompf, 2005, p.221). Many see new technologies as a deconstruction of barriers between the physical spaces, as communication technologies have enabled users to communicate directly from various sections across the globe.
The increase in new technologies has made way for industrial convergence, leading to the deconstruction of local centers of powers, as industries move towards a global market place. This has created several central issues for youths, including the ability to adapt to the emerging technological advancements and the global market place, "information can now be obtained from several points and young people must know how to access this information if they are to enter the workplace and communicate effectively" (M/Cyclopedia of New Media) The loss of national identity through youths due to a global presence is also another issue raised by academics.
Related Issues
What exactly is Digital Divide? It refers to political or societal issues that shows the socio-economic gap between the publics that have accesss to computers and internet as well as comparing them with people who does not have the access. In addition, it also refers to people who are able to use ICTs (Information and Communications technologies) effectively (Wikipedia, 2001).
Furthermore,there are vast differences between levels of information and communication techonology in different countries, which also includes rural areas. For example, there are youths who benefited from practical digital radio journalism apprenticeships, additionally some of them had their first experience in using technologies (Lester, 2002).
Computer technologies have developed into more and more important tools in everyday niches. It is common today for children to interact with different types of digital devices throughout a day, additionally many of them spend hours and hours in learning about and operating computer devices such as laptop computers, handheld computers, game consoles and other digital devices (Bell, 2005).
It is also known world widely that Black Youth in theMass Media are being an influence to people, especially youths. For example, the black youth and media effects paradigm, media socialization and quality of life issues, the cultural studies paradigm, and also the media technologies (Watkins, 2005).
People who plays violent video games such as Doom, Wolfenstein 3D or Mortal Kombat can increase a person's aggressive thoughts, feelings and behavior both in laboratory settings and in actual life. Furthermore, violent video games may be more harmful than violent television and movies because they are interactive and very engrossing as well. It shows how technologies influence an individual, especially the youth. Moreover, there are negative and positive values in playing video games. While there are violent fantasy games out there many youths play video games as it helps them to relieve stress when they are under pressure in their studies (Zumtreamm, 2005).
http://wiki.media-culture.org.au/index.php/Youth_Culture_and_New_Technologies
New technologies offer a culture of information, pleasure and relative autonomy, all of which are of particular appeal to society's youth. This has implications not only for young people themselves but also for their relationships within the family and between generations. The advent of globalisation has meant, for many young people, the sphere of experience has become global and local at once. Young people are often among the first to take advantage of their introduction. Subsequently, the challenge is to give culturally valid meaning to the use of new technologies.
New technologies have continued to make significant inroads into the inner workings of society, this holds true for youth as well. "As new technology becomes increasingly embedded in everyday niches, it is common for youth to interact with dozens of digital devices throughout a typical day, and many spend hour-upon-hour learning about and manipulating computer devices such as laptop computers, handheld computers, game consoles, cell phones, pagers, and audio players" (Bell, 2005).
Contents
[hide]
* 1 History of Youth Culture and New Technologies
* 2 The importance of youth culture and new technologies
* 3 Central Issues
* 4 Related Issues
* 5 Further Information
o 5.1 See Also:
o 5.2 Reference
o 5.3 Contributors to This Entry Include:
History of Youth Culture and New Technologies
The concept of youth culture and new technologies is a relatively new term, however the rate at which technology has moved into the lives of the young as stated by Seel (1997, p.2) 'is historically unprecedented’. Growth within this area began in August 1981 when IBM released the IBM PC (personal computer) (Bellis, 2005). From here the industry continued to grow with Apple in 1983 releasing ‘Lisa’ their then latest project. ‘Lisa’ contained many ground-breaking functions such as a mouse, drop down menus, icons, folders, windows and copy and paste abilities among other features (Bellis, 2005).
Following the establishment of home PC's the 1980's also bought with it the introduction of video games; items which were soon to dominate the toy market. Video games were one of the first mediums to combine visuals and active participation for children and youths, as defined by the Wikipedia, they are a form interactive multimedia used as entertainment (Wikimedia, 1997).
As stated in Seel (1997, p.3) by 1989 out of 20 of the best selling toys on the market 16 were video games or video-game-related. The next major development following this was the internet, which was established in the 1990’s. It has been described as the combination of “the interactivity of video games, the information of computers, and the images of MTV�? and thus the internet “created an entirely new means of social interaction�? (Seel, 1997, p.5).
In countries where there are high rates of boradband connectivity many of their youth are able to play online games together. The players are not physically located in the space, they are often involed in socialising together by connecting domestic spaces and time zones through online gaming communities. These activities can have a large impact on the broader youth culture (Flew, 2005, pp.108-109).
Presently computers, the internet, mobile phones, television and VCR’s are competing with one and other in the ever growing electronic arena (Seel, 1997, p.2). More recently as a result of considerable technological advances there has been the convergence of individual technologies. An example of this is the convergence of mobile phone technologies with that of the internet. Young people today can now communicate to other youths around the world as well as access information from the internet via their mobile phone.
The importance of youth culture and new technologies
According to Roy Morgan Research, almost 80 per cent of Australians aged 14-24 access the internet at least once a month, more than a third said they cannot live without a mobile phone and 44 per cent believed computers and technology have given them more control over their lives (Aust. Youth Facts and Stats 2005). The networked generation’s trend towards online activities and interactive media has also resulted in a dramatic decline in traditional activities such as newspaper readership. More than half of all Australians aged 18-29 read the newspaper 30 years ago, now the figure barely tops 20 per cent (AYFS 2005). The digital revolution means the world is literally at your fingertips.
New media technologies are increasingly becoming more than just a simple way to pass the time. In fact, some academics suggest that technology is at the very cultural heart of the current generation of young people. “For the new culture, a trip into virtual reality is far more significant than remembering Proust,�? (Kelly, 1998). Technology, such as the internet, mobile phones, PDA’s and iPods to name a bare few, provide young people with unlimited access to opportunity. It has revolutionised the way we communicate and interact with each other. “Technology generates opportunities: new things to explain; new ways of expression; new media of communications; and creates new forms of destruction,�? (Kelly, 1998).
Young people’s access to new technologies at home, at school, in the work place, even at the local McDonald’s restaurant, allows for constant connectivity to the networked world. Youth are plugged into every possible outlet, 100 per cent of the time, partly because they want to be and partly because they need to be in order to be competitive and play participatory role in today’s world. As youth use the new technologies, they produce the substance of every day and making the meaning of their culture (Trend, 1997).
However, the technical and social convergence brought about as a result of developments in technology is already creating interaction problems, in particular in the younger users. Cyberbullying is a disturbing new trend among young people abusing the technology. The implication is that in an arena where the law is largely not applicable, socially agreed upon values and boundaries must be upheld and respected in order for us to make full use of the technology available.
Central Issues
New technologies have had an influencing impact within society, affecting the way in which people, largely the younger populace, interact, socialize and work. Though since the introduction of new technologies there has been many issues that have arisen by the public and the scholars as to the impact new technologies has over youths of society.
One of the key issues that have arisen from youth culture and new technologies is the growing dependency of such technologies as the Internet among the youth of society. Arguments have arisen over the addiction and over reliance some youths have towards new technologies especially the Internet and the various online communities it provides, particularly online chat and online gaming programs. Among the issues that have been addressed are the adverse impacts of Cyberspace addiction, and the displacement between reality and virtual reality, and its impacts on real world social relationships, Health and communication skills. Further more issues have stirred over privacy issues of Internet content as well as the unrestricted filtering of information that youths are able to gain access to.
New technologies have over time branched into the various spheres in society and have been implicated within the educational systems of many nations. The development of technologies and the innovation of communication tools have enhanced various learning aspects. Advancements in particular ICT’s have improved the standards of vocational education and Distance_Education for youth within various sections of the globe. “ICT crept through the side door into education with promises of time saving, efficiency and improvements in learning�? (Kompf, 2005, p.221). Many see new technologies as a deconstruction of barriers between the physical spaces, as communication technologies have enabled users to communicate directly from various sections across the globe.
The increase in new technologies has made way for industrial convergence, leading to the deconstruction of local centers of powers, as industries move towards a global market place. This has created several central issues for youths, including the ability to adapt to the emerging technological advancements and the global market place, "information can now be obtained from several points and young people must know how to access this information if they are to enter the workplace and communicate effectively" (M/Cyclopedia of New Media) The loss of national identity through youths due to a global presence is also another issue raised by academics.
Related Issues
What exactly is Digital Divide? It refers to political or societal issues that shows the socio-economic gap between the publics that have accesss to computers and internet as well as comparing them with people who does not have the access. In addition, it also refers to people who are able to use ICTs (Information and Communications technologies) effectively (Wikipedia, 2001).
Furthermore,there are vast differences between levels of information and communication techonology in different countries, which also includes rural areas. For example, there are youths who benefited from practical digital radio journalism apprenticeships, additionally some of them had their first experience in using technologies (Lester, 2002).
Computer technologies have developed into more and more important tools in everyday niches. It is common today for children to interact with different types of digital devices throughout a day, additionally many of them spend hours and hours in learning about and operating computer devices such as laptop computers, handheld computers, game consoles and other digital devices (Bell, 2005).
It is also known world widely that Black Youth in theMass Media are being an influence to people, especially youths. For example, the black youth and media effects paradigm, media socialization and quality of life issues, the cultural studies paradigm, and also the media technologies (Watkins, 2005).
People who plays violent video games such as Doom, Wolfenstein 3D or Mortal Kombat can increase a person's aggressive thoughts, feelings and behavior both in laboratory settings and in actual life. Furthermore, violent video games may be more harmful than violent television and movies because they are interactive and very engrossing as well. It shows how technologies influence an individual, especially the youth. Moreover, there are negative and positive values in playing video games. While there are violent fantasy games out there many youths play video games as it helps them to relieve stress when they are under pressure in their studies (Zumtreamm, 2005).
http://wiki.media-culture.org.au/index.php/Youth_Culture_and_New_Technologies
A new etiquette for the iPhone generation
October 21, 2008
The behavioral and societal effects of Apple's revolutionary device need attention, analysts say
By Tom Kaneshige | InfoWorld
Armin Henreich's infamous "I Am Rich" iPhone application -- a $1,000 ruby-red screen saver -- was pulled from Apple App Store shelves months ago, but its message still resonates loudly.
Now the iPhone, the tech symbol of the "in" crowd, is on the verge of crossing the line into AIG-like excess and arrogance. "I'm not sure, under the current economic conditions, that it's a great statement to make," says Rob Enderle, principal analyst of the Enderle Group. "You may not want to flash it."
[ Don't be annoying! If you have or plan to get an iPhone, be sure to observe InfoWorld's 10 key iPhone etiquette tips ]
From "my apps are cooler than your apps" contests to "sent from my iPhone" e-mail footers, people love showing off their iPhones. That's not surprising, given that the users most compelled to buy the latest and greatest handsets and cell phones are "alpha dogs," says Sarah Welch, COO of Mindset Media, which helps companies target ads based on personality traits. It's when alpha-dog enthusiasm goes overboard and becomes bad manners that others get annoyed.
Yet the iPhone's cultural impact is much more than just another wedge separating the haves and have-nots; the iPhone changes how people interact with each other and their surroundings. Traditional cell phones and iPods already audibly isolated people in their own little worlds, and iPhone's visual carnival pushes that isolation further.
With more iPhone-like devices hitting the streets (most notably, Research in Motion's BlackBerry Storm and T-Mobile's Google Android-based G1), the notion of a siloed nation is neither far-fetched nor far off.
Indeed, traditional cell phones rattled American culture in only a few short years. In 2006, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger put the kibosh on the use of cell phones while driving in California -- "you're terminated!" -- which led to a rash of tiny Bluetooth headsets sprouting from people's ears.
"You can walk around and be insane, and people will think you're just another person with a headset," Enderle says. "With cell phones, we were largely talking on the phones, and that created a problem. We've moved to things like the iPhone that are much more visual, which makes the problem more pronounced."
The visual nature of the iPhone can be a big distraction. Will consumers, walking around with their heads down as they play a game or look at a map on the iPhone's mini-screen, collide with each other like pinballs?
Glibness aside, there are real and tragic consequences to being visually distracted. Last month, a train engineer in Los Angeles was allegedly text messaging on his cell phone moments before he crashed into a freight train, killing 25 people, including himself.
"These things are significant distractions," Enderle says, "and I think the culture is going to have to wrap its arms around a certain number of behaviors that reduce those distractions."
Read more about smartphones and mobile computing in InfoWorld's Mobilize Channel.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/new-etiquette-iphone-generation-566
The behavioral and societal effects of Apple's revolutionary device need attention, analysts say
By Tom Kaneshige | InfoWorld
Armin Henreich's infamous "I Am Rich" iPhone application -- a $1,000 ruby-red screen saver -- was pulled from Apple App Store shelves months ago, but its message still resonates loudly.
Now the iPhone, the tech symbol of the "in" crowd, is on the verge of crossing the line into AIG-like excess and arrogance. "I'm not sure, under the current economic conditions, that it's a great statement to make," says Rob Enderle, principal analyst of the Enderle Group. "You may not want to flash it."
[ Don't be annoying! If you have or plan to get an iPhone, be sure to observe InfoWorld's 10 key iPhone etiquette tips ]
From "my apps are cooler than your apps" contests to "sent from my iPhone" e-mail footers, people love showing off their iPhones. That's not surprising, given that the users most compelled to buy the latest and greatest handsets and cell phones are "alpha dogs," says Sarah Welch, COO of Mindset Media, which helps companies target ads based on personality traits. It's when alpha-dog enthusiasm goes overboard and becomes bad manners that others get annoyed.
Yet the iPhone's cultural impact is much more than just another wedge separating the haves and have-nots; the iPhone changes how people interact with each other and their surroundings. Traditional cell phones and iPods already audibly isolated people in their own little worlds, and iPhone's visual carnival pushes that isolation further.
With more iPhone-like devices hitting the streets (most notably, Research in Motion's BlackBerry Storm and T-Mobile's Google Android-based G1), the notion of a siloed nation is neither far-fetched nor far off.
Indeed, traditional cell phones rattled American culture in only a few short years. In 2006, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger put the kibosh on the use of cell phones while driving in California -- "you're terminated!" -- which led to a rash of tiny Bluetooth headsets sprouting from people's ears.
"You can walk around and be insane, and people will think you're just another person with a headset," Enderle says. "With cell phones, we were largely talking on the phones, and that created a problem. We've moved to things like the iPhone that are much more visual, which makes the problem more pronounced."
The visual nature of the iPhone can be a big distraction. Will consumers, walking around with their heads down as they play a game or look at a map on the iPhone's mini-screen, collide with each other like pinballs?
Glibness aside, there are real and tragic consequences to being visually distracted. Last month, a train engineer in Los Angeles was allegedly text messaging on his cell phone moments before he crashed into a freight train, killing 25 people, including himself.
"These things are significant distractions," Enderle says, "and I think the culture is going to have to wrap its arms around a certain number of behaviors that reduce those distractions."
Read more about smartphones and mobile computing in InfoWorld's Mobilize Channel.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/new-etiquette-iphone-generation-566
Sunday, February 21, 2010
commute
Commuting
The emergence of commuting in Chicago and its ever-growing importance in the daily urban experience is a concomitant of the region's long-term population growth, the spatial expansion of the urban built environment, and the increasing separation of home and work for most residents over time. The history of commuting is one of changing land-use patterns, lengthening distances and changing geometry of travel, evolving modes of transportation, shifts in the social composition of commuters, and the rise of a metropolitan commuter culture. As Chicago became metropolitan, commuting involved more and more people, a more complex geography of movement, and a sequence of technological innovations adding variety to the transportation system. The interconnected elements can be viewed from the perspective of five broad eras of commutation.
From its beginning in 1830 until the mid-1850s most of the city was walkable, contained within a radius of about two miles from the center. Many residents worked in or close to home, and only the well-to-do could afford to cluster in a few prestigious districts removed from the central area. In the grocery trade, for example, retail grocers of necessity lived above their stores, scattered throughout the town's neighborhoods, whereas most wholesale grocers made a fine enough living to reside a carriage ride away on a street with social cachet. Chicago's bankers at that time, except for a very few who rented central hotel rooms, all lived in quiet districts away from the noise and hubbub of downtown, giving sociogeographical definition to the phrase “bankers' hours.”
In 1856, Paul Cornell initiated the railroad suburb in greater Chicago, when he persuaded the Illinois Central Railroad to operate local passenger service to Hyde Park, six miles south of the city center. Within the city proper, horse omnibus lines began in 1850 and steadily multiplied their routes as the built-up area expanded, to be superseded by the street railway in 1859. Three years later, 3,512,272 passengers were being carried annually by horsecar through the city. More dramatic, however, was the emerging commuter train service, offered on railroads which by the 1880s fanned out in 15 different directions, creating a large metropolitan pattern resembling the spokes of a giant wheel. Such suburban commutation stimulated the development of strings of railroad suburbs out to a distance of 30–40 miles and enabled an enlarged class of business managers and well-paid professionals to live in semirural settings far from their city offices, a pattern deeply etched on the region by 1934 and still operating today.
A third phase in commuter history may be said to have arrived with the mechanization of street railways in the 1880s and the appearance of rapid transit service the following decade. As railroad commuting produced a roughly star-shaped outline to the metropolitan built-up area as a whole, steam-driven cable car and later electric streetcar service along most major Chicago streets made possible a new level of access from the city's burgeoning neighborhoods. Commuters could now reach downtown as well as factory sites along developing river and rail corridors within the core areas of the urban mass. This trend greatly increased the daily flows of workers to and from the central business district, but it also promoted crosstown commuting to noncentral jobs and local shopping districts. The addition of elevated rapid transit service between 1892 and 1915, tied together in the famous “Loop” circuit around the downtown created in 1911, served to further concentrate centripetal movement from outskirts to center. Interurban railroads extended the geographical reach of low-cost commuting from satellite cities in the metropolitan region.
With the rapid spread of automobile ownership by the 1920s, commuting became somewhat more spatially and socially diffuse, but the focus on downtown was still overwhelming, forcing major changes in downtown land use to accommodate cars in parking lots and new parking structures. Between the 1920s and 1950s, the “rush hour” became a fixture of Chicago urban life, as cars—parked and moving—jostled with streetcars and, after 1927, buses for street space created in the horse and carriage era. By 1940, Chicago's Loop received 603,000 daily commuters, of whom over 113,000 came in from the suburbs. Significantly, one-quarter of all commuters drove in by car, one-quarter took the streetcar, one-quarter the elevated trains, one-eighth the commuter trains, and the rest came by bus or other means.
Continued metropolitan growth and densification of the inner built-up area generated traffic volumes and congestion sufficient to spur the construction of limited-access superhighways. These consisted of urban parkways, beginning with Lake Shore Drive in 1933, and expressways, starting with the Congress (now Eisenhower) Expressway in 1955–1960. The new superhighways, when linked to their suburban extensions (themselves designed to serve long-distance travel), did widen the regional catchment area for commuters to the city of Chicago. But they also fed a new pattern of “reverse” commuting from the central city to the suburbs. Already in 1960, while about 330,000 suburbanites worked in Chicago, over 100,000 Chicagoans worked in the suburbs. In recent decades the automobile has become the essential means for commuters to get to work in the metropolitan area, as with all other American metropolitan regions. Equally striking, however, has been the survival of a historical legacy of mixed transportation options, at least in the inner metropolitan zone. Many districts there harbor commuters who prefer walking, bicycling, or taking public transit to work, a pattern well illustrated in 1980 and not much changed since then. Chicago has even pioneered the building of rapid transit lines along expressway median strips to extend such choice.
Metropolitan decentralization of population and jobs during the second half of the twentieth century changed regional commuting from a centripetal to a largely diffuse pattern. At the same time, it pushed the working class and many of the poor into the ranks of regional commuters for the first time. The recent repopulating of the city center with its globalizing management functions has revivified the multimodal transportation environment of the core. As the new millennium dawned, “edge cities” in metropolitan Chicago were showing increasing interest in rapid transit links with O' Hare International Airport and the city of Chicago.
Michael P. Conzen
Bibliography
Berry, Brian J. L. Case Studies of Commuting Fields and Metropolitan Definition. 1966.
Breese, Gerald W. The Daytime Population of the Central Business District of Chicago, With Particular Reference to the Factor of Transportation. 1949.
Cudahy, Brian J. Destination Loop: The Story of Rapid Transit Railroading in and around Chicago. 1982.
http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/323.html
The emergence of commuting in Chicago and its ever-growing importance in the daily urban experience is a concomitant of the region's long-term population growth, the spatial expansion of the urban built environment, and the increasing separation of home and work for most residents over time. The history of commuting is one of changing land-use patterns, lengthening distances and changing geometry of travel, evolving modes of transportation, shifts in the social composition of commuters, and the rise of a metropolitan commuter culture. As Chicago became metropolitan, commuting involved more and more people, a more complex geography of movement, and a sequence of technological innovations adding variety to the transportation system. The interconnected elements can be viewed from the perspective of five broad eras of commutation.
From its beginning in 1830 until the mid-1850s most of the city was walkable, contained within a radius of about two miles from the center. Many residents worked in or close to home, and only the well-to-do could afford to cluster in a few prestigious districts removed from the central area. In the grocery trade, for example, retail grocers of necessity lived above their stores, scattered throughout the town's neighborhoods, whereas most wholesale grocers made a fine enough living to reside a carriage ride away on a street with social cachet. Chicago's bankers at that time, except for a very few who rented central hotel rooms, all lived in quiet districts away from the noise and hubbub of downtown, giving sociogeographical definition to the phrase “bankers' hours.”
In 1856, Paul Cornell initiated the railroad suburb in greater Chicago, when he persuaded the Illinois Central Railroad to operate local passenger service to Hyde Park, six miles south of the city center. Within the city proper, horse omnibus lines began in 1850 and steadily multiplied their routes as the built-up area expanded, to be superseded by the street railway in 1859. Three years later, 3,512,272 passengers were being carried annually by horsecar through the city. More dramatic, however, was the emerging commuter train service, offered on railroads which by the 1880s fanned out in 15 different directions, creating a large metropolitan pattern resembling the spokes of a giant wheel. Such suburban commutation stimulated the development of strings of railroad suburbs out to a distance of 30–40 miles and enabled an enlarged class of business managers and well-paid professionals to live in semirural settings far from their city offices, a pattern deeply etched on the region by 1934 and still operating today.
A third phase in commuter history may be said to have arrived with the mechanization of street railways in the 1880s and the appearance of rapid transit service the following decade. As railroad commuting produced a roughly star-shaped outline to the metropolitan built-up area as a whole, steam-driven cable car and later electric streetcar service along most major Chicago streets made possible a new level of access from the city's burgeoning neighborhoods. Commuters could now reach downtown as well as factory sites along developing river and rail corridors within the core areas of the urban mass. This trend greatly increased the daily flows of workers to and from the central business district, but it also promoted crosstown commuting to noncentral jobs and local shopping districts. The addition of elevated rapid transit service between 1892 and 1915, tied together in the famous “Loop” circuit around the downtown created in 1911, served to further concentrate centripetal movement from outskirts to center. Interurban railroads extended the geographical reach of low-cost commuting from satellite cities in the metropolitan region.
With the rapid spread of automobile ownership by the 1920s, commuting became somewhat more spatially and socially diffuse, but the focus on downtown was still overwhelming, forcing major changes in downtown land use to accommodate cars in parking lots and new parking structures. Between the 1920s and 1950s, the “rush hour” became a fixture of Chicago urban life, as cars—parked and moving—jostled with streetcars and, after 1927, buses for street space created in the horse and carriage era. By 1940, Chicago's Loop received 603,000 daily commuters, of whom over 113,000 came in from the suburbs. Significantly, one-quarter of all commuters drove in by car, one-quarter took the streetcar, one-quarter the elevated trains, one-eighth the commuter trains, and the rest came by bus or other means.
Continued metropolitan growth and densification of the inner built-up area generated traffic volumes and congestion sufficient to spur the construction of limited-access superhighways. These consisted of urban parkways, beginning with Lake Shore Drive in 1933, and expressways, starting with the Congress (now Eisenhower) Expressway in 1955–1960. The new superhighways, when linked to their suburban extensions (themselves designed to serve long-distance travel), did widen the regional catchment area for commuters to the city of Chicago. But they also fed a new pattern of “reverse” commuting from the central city to the suburbs. Already in 1960, while about 330,000 suburbanites worked in Chicago, over 100,000 Chicagoans worked in the suburbs. In recent decades the automobile has become the essential means for commuters to get to work in the metropolitan area, as with all other American metropolitan regions. Equally striking, however, has been the survival of a historical legacy of mixed transportation options, at least in the inner metropolitan zone. Many districts there harbor commuters who prefer walking, bicycling, or taking public transit to work, a pattern well illustrated in 1980 and not much changed since then. Chicago has even pioneered the building of rapid transit lines along expressway median strips to extend such choice.
Metropolitan decentralization of population and jobs during the second half of the twentieth century changed regional commuting from a centripetal to a largely diffuse pattern. At the same time, it pushed the working class and many of the poor into the ranks of regional commuters for the first time. The recent repopulating of the city center with its globalizing management functions has revivified the multimodal transportation environment of the core. As the new millennium dawned, “edge cities” in metropolitan Chicago were showing increasing interest in rapid transit links with O' Hare International Airport and the city of Chicago.
Michael P. Conzen
Bibliography
Berry, Brian J. L. Case Studies of Commuting Fields and Metropolitan Definition. 1966.
Breese, Gerald W. The Daytime Population of the Central Business District of Chicago, With Particular Reference to the Factor of Transportation. 1949.
Cudahy, Brian J. Destination Loop: The Story of Rapid Transit Railroading in and around Chicago. 1982.
http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/323.html
Friday, February 19, 2010
New Hypothesis
This thesis presents the hypothesis that the place of commute between work and home should be develop into ‘the Third Place' - the space in time, where people can wind down from the work day and regenerate. In contrast to the current experience, many stresses of urban commuting like environmental, such as noise, crowds, pollution, or traffic; or psychological, such as the loneliness of social isolation, or, conversely, the need for meditative solitude; or inconsiderate human behaviors, such as talking loudly, playing music, or causing a scene on the subway, should be transformed to nurturing, supportive, highly valued, sought-after experience, one which stimulates positive emotional responses, intellectual growth and could help to alter people mindset to suit the environment they are going into. Should be understood customer wants and needs to deliver them at human interactive level, that opens the doors between people or allows others to simply lose themselves and relax. Such a hypothesis would enable commuters to rely on their commute as a vitalizing part of their day, promoting happiness and well-being, and generally improving the quality of life in urban centers-even beyond the commute itself.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
First Subway Attempt
In February, 1870, one year after the surreptitious construction project began, Alfred Ely Beach revealed his secret to a dumbfounded public. Clean, quiet, brightly lit, and smooth riding, its station equipped with a grand piano, chandeliers and a goldfish-stocked fountain, Beach's subway created a sensation in New York. In it's first year of operation 400,000 visitors paid twenty-five cents to enjoy the block-long ride between Warren Street and Murray Street, and back again.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/technology/nyunderground/secret.html
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Eye-Theatre Personal Multimedia Viewer Glass Reviews
Eye-Theater Personal Multimedia Viewer is a glass product from PDT that acts as a head-mounted multimedia and video viewer that promises to deliver an “immersive audiovisual environment”. Eye-Theater users wear the glasses display into their eyes and will be able to watch to a movie or video at a display that has a similar effect to watching a big 50″ screen from around 2.5m. Eye-Theater features twin TFT LCD screens to display 320 x 240 video resolution which similar to iPod video output, integrated stereo earphones, supports NTSC/PAL/SECAM video systems, comfortable without straining the eyes by allowing the eyes to focus at comfort distance of 2.5m, weighing 70g, and compatible with iPod with video, Microsoft Zune, TV, VCR, portable DVD player, video games console, camcorders and any other entertainment devices with Video-Out.
vnunet reviews Eye-Theater video viewing glasses and concludes with rating of 3 out of 5 that the big-screen effect works well and picture quality improved in a darkened room, though. Unfortunately the earphones that are integrated into the Eye Theatre’s arms become uncomfortable very quickly. Sound quality isn’t great either. The £150 asking price may sound steep but it’s by far the cheapest device of its kind. The real question, though, is in what situation you’d feel comfortable wearing them.
Reg Hardware reviews Eye-Theatre video glasses for iPod and concludes that the Eye-Theatre’s a love-it or hate-it device. 5G iPod owners who watch videos on long flights will find it handy, and there’s no doubt it has a certain cool quality – though it would have rather more if the design was a little less naff. It’s a good device to have to hand when you want to watch one thing and the missus wants to watch another.
subway architecture
subway architecture
london’s underground became the first subway system in the world when it began operation in 1863.
since then, underground subways have been built in almost every major city of the world. from new york
and paris to hong kong and dubai, subways are an essential part of public transportation in cities.
within these systems, architecture plays a big role in defining the environment of the subway. here is
a collection of some of the most architecturally interesting subway stations.
t-centralen station (photo via flickr)
stockholm tunnelbana
the subway system in stockholm, sweden features art installations in almost every station. the city’s 100 stations
feature art by almost 140 artists and it is often called the world’s longest art gallery. the system may focus on
artwork, but it also features a number of stations with unusual architecture. the t-centralen station is one of the
most distinctive designed by per olof ultvedt in 1975. the station features a massive mural painted on the cavern
like ceiling that exposes the rocky core of the city. many of the system’s stations also feature this unique cavern
ceiling that gives them an organic feeling and unique atmosphere.
stockholm tunnelbana station (photo via flickr)
solna centrum station (photo via flickr)
westfriedhof station light installation by ingo mauer (photo via flickr)
munich u-bahn
munich’s u-bahn subway system only began in 1972, but it has quickly grown into a 98 station system spread
across the entire city. because of its young age munich had the advantage of learning from the mistakes of other
systems creating spacious and efficient stations. while the first stations were quite plain, the architecture of its
new stations is often quite daring. some stand out stations include the colourful dulferstrasse station designed
by peter lanz and jurgen rauch and westfriedhof, which features lighting installations by ingo mauer.
candidplatz station (photo via flickr)
georg-brauchle ring station with installation by franz ackermann (photo via flickr)
st. quiren platz station by hermann + ottl (photo via flickr)
bilbao metro station by foster+partners
bilbao metro
the bilbao metro is unusual among subway systems since it was designed and engineered as a whole. the stations
were all designed by foster+partners, who set to use dramatic curved forms to create a signature look for the
city’s transportation infrastructure. inside the stations, the space was kept as open as possible, using the full
height and width of the underground tunnels. above ground, each station features a curved glass entrance that
is reminiscent of a shell and became known as a fosteritos by locals.
http://www.fosterandpartners.com
bilbao metro station by foster+partners
bilbao metro station by foster+partners
bund sightseeing tunnel (photo via flickr)
shanghai – bund sightseeing tunnel
the bund sightseeing tunnel located in shanghai, china isn’t technically a subway system but rather a short
distance transporter. measuring only 647m long, the train tunnel connects the bund to pudong. along the way
the rider is bombarded with lighting effects, music and special effects that turn the ride into something out of
this world.
trains in the bund sightseeing tunnel (photo via flickr)
bund sightseeing tunnel (photo via flickr)
dubai metro station by aedas (photo via flickr)
dubai – metro station
one of the world’s newest subway systems is the automated rail network in dubai which officially opened in
september of 2009. the red line which includes 10 stations is the first part of the project to be completed and
features the aedas designed metro station. the international firm was selected to design all 47 stations in the
new system along with two rail depots. this particular station features a curved rood design that covers the
station and lets light in through small windows. the iconic building is just the start of a series of stations that
will push the boundaries for subway architecture.
dubai metro station by aedas (photo via flickr)
dubai metro station by aedas (photo via flickr)
iidabashi station by makoto sei watanabe architects (photos via tokyo buildings)
tokyo - iidabashi station
tokyo is well known for being one of the busiest subway systems is the world, but so well known for its subway
architecture. the oedo line in tokyo is the newest in the city’ massive system and features some interesting
designs like iidabashi station designed by makoto sei watanabe architects. the station was built in 2000 and
features a distinctive faced clad with massive curved steel and glass forms. inside the station has numerous
design features including a geometric green light sculpture running the length of the escalator shaft. the station’s
design is also significant since it was create through computer generated forms.
iidabashi station by makoto sei watanabe architects
iidabashi station by makoto sei watanabe architects
iidabashi station by makoto sei watanabe architects (photo via flickr)
line a station (photo via flickr)
prague – line a
prague’s subway system has a diverse array of station designs that span numerous architectural styles. the line a
stations all feature distinctive tile cladding that gives them a futuristic feel. each station along the line has
a different colour of aluminum tile that is repeated in concave or convex patterns. the tiles are installed along
the tracks and curve up the wall and onto the ceiling. this subtle variation from station to station gives riders
a navigation system to guide them on their travels.
line a station (photo via flickr)
komsomolskaya station (photo via flickr)
moscow – komsomolskaya station
moscow’s komsomolskaya station definitely goes down as the most elaborate subway station. the design was
built in the 1930’s and features large chandeliers, vaulted plaster ceilings and arched walkways. the classical
design of the space gives the station a palatial feeling, not something you see in most subways. the station also
boasts hand painted frescoes and detailed plaster moulding on almost every surface.
komsomolskaya station (photo via flickr)
museum station by diamond+schmitt architects
toronto - museum station
while most of the subways stations in toronto are very traditional, one newly remodeled station stands out.
museum station is located right below the city’s royal ontario museum which was recently added to by daniel
libeskind. the new station replaces simple columns with recreations of the museum’s collection including
egyptian sarcophaguses, totem poles and mayan statues. the station also has walls clad with large aluminum
panels that are cut-out with the station name to reveal a hieroglyphics pattern behind. the unique station links
the subway with the museum above.
museum station by diamond+schmitt architects
drassanes station by on-a arquitectura
barcelona – drassanes station
the spanish firm on-a arquitectura recently remodeled the barcelona subway station drassanes. the space’s new
design was based on the concept of using the same materials as the subway cars that drive through the station.
a white concrete covers the walls and slowly blends into the floors which were made vibration proof. the ceiling
was made black to contrast the white and is lined with long angular light fixtures. other corridors in the station
feature a mosaic of oversized tiles in a variety of vivid colours.
drassanes station by on-a arquitectura
drassanes station by on-a arquitectura
london’s underground became the first subway system in the world when it began operation in 1863.
since then, underground subways have been built in almost every major city of the world. from new york
and paris to hong kong and dubai, subways are an essential part of public transportation in cities.
within these systems, architecture plays a big role in defining the environment of the subway. here is
a collection of some of the most architecturally interesting subway stations.
t-centralen station (photo via flickr)
stockholm tunnelbana
the subway system in stockholm, sweden features art installations in almost every station. the city’s 100 stations
feature art by almost 140 artists and it is often called the world’s longest art gallery. the system may focus on
artwork, but it also features a number of stations with unusual architecture. the t-centralen station is one of the
most distinctive designed by per olof ultvedt in 1975. the station features a massive mural painted on the cavern
like ceiling that exposes the rocky core of the city. many of the system’s stations also feature this unique cavern
ceiling that gives them an organic feeling and unique atmosphere.
stockholm tunnelbana station (photo via flickr)
solna centrum station (photo via flickr)
westfriedhof station light installation by ingo mauer (photo via flickr)
munich u-bahn
munich’s u-bahn subway system only began in 1972, but it has quickly grown into a 98 station system spread
across the entire city. because of its young age munich had the advantage of learning from the mistakes of other
systems creating spacious and efficient stations. while the first stations were quite plain, the architecture of its
new stations is often quite daring. some stand out stations include the colourful dulferstrasse station designed
by peter lanz and jurgen rauch and westfriedhof, which features lighting installations by ingo mauer.
candidplatz station (photo via flickr)
georg-brauchle ring station with installation by franz ackermann (photo via flickr)
st. quiren platz station by hermann + ottl (photo via flickr)
bilbao metro station by foster+partners
bilbao metro
the bilbao metro is unusual among subway systems since it was designed and engineered as a whole. the stations
were all designed by foster+partners, who set to use dramatic curved forms to create a signature look for the
city’s transportation infrastructure. inside the stations, the space was kept as open as possible, using the full
height and width of the underground tunnels. above ground, each station features a curved glass entrance that
is reminiscent of a shell and became known as a fosteritos by locals.
http://www.fosterandpartners.com
bilbao metro station by foster+partners
bilbao metro station by foster+partners
bund sightseeing tunnel (photo via flickr)
shanghai – bund sightseeing tunnel
the bund sightseeing tunnel located in shanghai, china isn’t technically a subway system but rather a short
distance transporter. measuring only 647m long, the train tunnel connects the bund to pudong. along the way
the rider is bombarded with lighting effects, music and special effects that turn the ride into something out of
this world.
trains in the bund sightseeing tunnel (photo via flickr)
bund sightseeing tunnel (photo via flickr)
dubai metro station by aedas (photo via flickr)
dubai – metro station
one of the world’s newest subway systems is the automated rail network in dubai which officially opened in
september of 2009. the red line which includes 10 stations is the first part of the project to be completed and
features the aedas designed metro station. the international firm was selected to design all 47 stations in the
new system along with two rail depots. this particular station features a curved rood design that covers the
station and lets light in through small windows. the iconic building is just the start of a series of stations that
will push the boundaries for subway architecture.
dubai metro station by aedas (photo via flickr)
dubai metro station by aedas (photo via flickr)
iidabashi station by makoto sei watanabe architects (photos via tokyo buildings)
tokyo - iidabashi station
tokyo is well known for being one of the busiest subway systems is the world, but so well known for its subway
architecture. the oedo line in tokyo is the newest in the city’ massive system and features some interesting
designs like iidabashi station designed by makoto sei watanabe architects. the station was built in 2000 and
features a distinctive faced clad with massive curved steel and glass forms. inside the station has numerous
design features including a geometric green light sculpture running the length of the escalator shaft. the station’s
design is also significant since it was create through computer generated forms.
iidabashi station by makoto sei watanabe architects
iidabashi station by makoto sei watanabe architects
iidabashi station by makoto sei watanabe architects (photo via flickr)
line a station (photo via flickr)
prague – line a
prague’s subway system has a diverse array of station designs that span numerous architectural styles. the line a
stations all feature distinctive tile cladding that gives them a futuristic feel. each station along the line has
a different colour of aluminum tile that is repeated in concave or convex patterns. the tiles are installed along
the tracks and curve up the wall and onto the ceiling. this subtle variation from station to station gives riders
a navigation system to guide them on their travels.
line a station (photo via flickr)
komsomolskaya station (photo via flickr)
moscow – komsomolskaya station
moscow’s komsomolskaya station definitely goes down as the most elaborate subway station. the design was
built in the 1930’s and features large chandeliers, vaulted plaster ceilings and arched walkways. the classical
design of the space gives the station a palatial feeling, not something you see in most subways. the station also
boasts hand painted frescoes and detailed plaster moulding on almost every surface.
komsomolskaya station (photo via flickr)
museum station by diamond+schmitt architects
toronto - museum station
while most of the subways stations in toronto are very traditional, one newly remodeled station stands out.
museum station is located right below the city’s royal ontario museum which was recently added to by daniel
libeskind. the new station replaces simple columns with recreations of the museum’s collection including
egyptian sarcophaguses, totem poles and mayan statues. the station also has walls clad with large aluminum
panels that are cut-out with the station name to reveal a hieroglyphics pattern behind. the unique station links
the subway with the museum above.
museum station by diamond+schmitt architects
drassanes station by on-a arquitectura
barcelona – drassanes station
the spanish firm on-a arquitectura recently remodeled the barcelona subway station drassanes. the space’s new
design was based on the concept of using the same materials as the subway cars that drive through the station.
a white concrete covers the walls and slowly blends into the floors which were made vibration proof. the ceiling
was made black to contrast the white and is lined with long angular light fixtures. other corridors in the station
feature a mosaic of oversized tiles in a variety of vivid colours.
drassanes station by on-a arquitectura
drassanes station by on-a arquitectura
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