Re: <nettime> Cellphones and the Cancer of Cellspace

["Benjamin Geer" <benjamin.geer@btinternet.com>]

On Sat, Nov 11, 2000 at 11:09:10PM +0100, Marianne van den Boomen wrote:
> The need to sustain at least a private network in a society which
> had almost completely demolished public space or made it anonymous
> space. The need to be assured that you're not alone, that your
> existence is not in vain but connected to the existence of other
> people.  I'm serious about this, this is not ironic!

That's a good point.  The more public space is turned into commercial
space, the more people want to experience some kind of private space while
in public.  However, I would emphasise that, with the mobile phone, this
ostensibly private experience is mediated by a high-profile fashion
accessory, and that it isn't private at all, since everyone can hear what
you're saying.  It's more like a *pretend* private experience, which
involves going through the motions of private conversation, in full view
of the public, as if you were on stage.

> I don't have a mobile either. But there is no reason to disqualify
> the uses other people have for their mobiles.

I didn't mean to do so, and I agree that practical uses exist, but I don't
think they account for the immense popularity of mobile phones.

> >In a city like New York, where loneliness is the norm,
> >people wear their social relations as a badge of superiority.  It is
> >bad enough, they feel, to be lonely; it is worse to *appear* lonely.
> 
> My impression is completely the opposite. People talking in their mobiles
> seem to be completely unconscious about how they appear to passersby.
> (Otherwise they would not be talking so loud :-) They are in a private
> space, they are acting in their private network.

It would surprise me very much if they were truly unconscious of their
appearance.  Most of them seem to be ultra-conscious about every other
aspect of their appearance: hair, makeup, clothes, shoes, walk, facial
expression.  The same is true, I think, in New York, London, and Paris:
most people work very hard at the image that they project to strangers.  
They are *always* on stage, especially when walking down the street.  
This is why fashion is such big business in these cities. Advertising is
full of images of strangers admiring people who have bought the product
advertised.  This is connected with your point; in an urban landscape that
makes people feel unimportant and perhaps even nonexistent, fashion is an
attempt to say: "I exist!  I am important!" And I think that the mobile
phone is certainly part of this; it says, "I am important, and the proof
is that other people urgently need to talk to me; they can't wait until I
get home."

Surely we cannot take this at face value.  A century ago, people managed
to have rich social lives without any telephones at all.  My grandparents
(who were born in the first decade of the 20th century) had a dense
network of social relations, consisting of friends and relatives, in an
urban environment.  Today, we're used to a level of isolation and
rootlessness which makes the social fabric of 1900 hard to imagine.  As
loneliness increases, the desire to deny loneliness, to pretend it isn't
there, increases as well.  Hence the mobile phone.

> I would say the statement is: "Don't look! I'm not with you in a
> public space, I'm with my friends in my private space. Leave me
> there."

When someone uses a fashion accessory to say "Don't look at me," I think
we can assume that this is really a way of saying "Look at me!" A basic
principle of advertising is that if you tell people that something is
"private" (i.e. that they shouldn't look), it makes them want to look even
more.  In this sense, a person having a loud private conversation on their
mobile phone, in a public place, is like those fashion photographs in
which the laughing model is trying to cover the camera lens with her hand,
or like those "reality TV" shows that promise to let you watch the private
lives of strangers.  "My private life is better than yours; you should be
jealous."

-- 
Benjamin Geer
http://www.btinternet.com/~amisuk/bg

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