Cell Phone Sociability

The problems of cell phones, social space, and intimacy came up in a couple of different contexts on Saturday.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16182667 First,Weekend Edition Saturday broadcast a story on the illegal sale of cell phone jammers, devices that block cell phone reception within a limited area. The demand for this sort of device stems from the desire for what Tacchi would call "social silence" in public "interspaces," such as commuter trains, elevators, etc. It seems that some folks find the noise of overhearing intimate conversations in these spaces irritating enough to buy a jammer and enforce a regime of "silence." It seems apparent here that mobile phones as a communication medium heighten the contradictions in local understandings of public and private space. Thinking through this and my in-class critique of the Hulme and Truch piece on Thursday, it seems to me that in their discussion of the collapsing field of interspace, they have certainly put their finger on something important, a particular social irritant in which the issues of culture and habitus come bubbling up to the surface.

Indeed, I remember posted notices on the METRA trains a few years ago that encouraged people to be quieter when talking on the train, going so far as to point out a moment when a woman is talking with her therapist on the phone and many of her husband's coworkers learning that she was having an affair. In other words, it seems to me that the idea of interspace should be re-configured to describe the ways in which cell phone users psychologically create a zone of intimacy that straddles common conceptions of public and private space.

Another instantiation of this conception of interspace might emerge from the "shut up and drive" movement: the widespread belief that talking on a cell phone is a more heightened sense of distraction than trying to stop two kids fighting in the back seat, the need to eat a hamburger, or change a CD while driving--each of which also requiring one to take one's hands off the wheel to manage.

The second instance that brought this issue to mind on Saturday is the scene in Freaky Friday in which Jamie Lee Curtis is in a grocery store managing each of her portable communications devices (read: social identities a la Hulme and Truch) and changes her voice, speech register, and facial expression to address her husband-to-be, her kids, and a psychiatric patient. At one point while talking with her patient, she makes direct eye contact with a grocery clerk, affirms the humanity and beauty of this person, then gets off the phone and walks away, seemingly oblivious to the clerk's confusion.