What are you doing on that phone?

I wrote a sort of stray observation in the conclusion of my dissertation about a certain attribute of new media technologies: the way in which screens on portable technologies are typically oriented to face toward the user and remain obscure to others. The concerns over privacy vis a vis these media relates primarily to strangers (e.g., governments, corporations) knowing very private things about us and possibly using them against us. But in another way, these devices give us more privacy, privacy in our immediate physical surroundings. The screen orientation makes it harder to see what someone is watching, reading, or doing on their device, but what's more, there is an expectation that others not snoop and try to see what the user is watching/reading/doing.

I've been thinking about this, thinking about how it relates to the fact that we consider it to be rude when others are not paying attention to us but paying attention to their devices instead. I'm not talking about the moments when interaction is clearly expected (e.g., a job interview, a first date). Most of our lives are made up of moments where we are in the presence of others that we could converse with, but that it is not explicitly expected: hanging out with old friends, a lazy Sunday afternoon with a spouse. I think that part of the reason it feel can so alienating or discomforting to be in the presence of someone who is using a device is precisely because we do not know what he/she is reading/viewing/doing.

Here's a counter-example: someone you're hanging out with is reading a book. They're not talking to you, and you can't see precisely what they see (as you would if you were watching TV together), but you know the type of experience he or she is having. With a book, we know where we stand. We know what we're competing with. There is a sense of the psychic distance between ourselves and the person with which we share physical space. With a phone or a laptop? The person could be doing work, seeking out a better-looking partner than you, reading that website you hate, or that one that you love. I suppose that part of the anxiety comes from the fact that even if they're doing something you don't like, you can't do anything about it because you must respect their privacy.

There are ways to test this effect. It would probably work best with significant others, who have a long-term relationship and incentive to stay on each other's good sides and probably have some existing feelings regarding the other person's behavior. Get one person in a room with another who is either reading a book or a magazine, or get the person in a room with another who is on a phone or laptop. You could even have them in rooms with people using tablet PCs that are in one of two orientations: in the first condition, the screen is visible to the other person in the room; in the second condition, the screen is not visible to the other person in the room. Do the levels of anxiety or social exclusion (and the feelings of pain that come with it) increase when someone shares a room with a person using media technologies and they cannot see what the person is doing with those technologies?

If this turned out to be the case, then maybe we need to refine our media use etiquette rules. It's not necessarily a problem when people use digital devices around one another, and even if it is, it's probably unrealistic to expect people who live with one another to abstain from using digital devices around one another for long periods of time. Instead, perhaps we need to have more shared screen time. This is likely the idea behind technologies like Wii U or Chromecast: trying to give us the shared experience that television gave us while maintaining the interactivity and expanded options of the Internet. The only issue might be that we're left with an age old problem: who holds the remote? Who decides on the shape of the shared experience?

Maybe that's the trade-off. In order to avoid the social exclusion that comes with absent presence, we must relinquish some degree of privacy and control over our experiences.

Facebook Photo Album as Everyday Storytelling Device

Let's say you go on vacation for a week. You travel to some interesting place. How do you tell people about your vacation?

Social media is, among other things, the way that we tell people we know (and, sometimes, people we don't know) about things that happened to us. It's a kind of everyday storytelling medium, a way in which we can relate to the choices made by a filmmaker or novelist. As with any form of narrative, Facebook does not include every event that happened from every point of view. There are two "editorial moments" as which people decide what gets left in the story and what gets cut out: the moment at which they decide to take a picture and the moment at which they decide to post it. In addition to determining what gets left in or out of the story, the person assembling a Facebook photo album can re-arrange the order in which pictures are presented.

I can think of several reasons why this kind of temporal re-arranging may take place. You may want to "set the stage" for people looking through your photo album (assuming they encounter it in a linear fashion, starting at the beginning and clicking the "next" button as they go through the pictures). You may wait until the end of your vacation to take pictures of, say, the hotel in which you stayed. But you may put those pictures at the beginning of your album, to orient the viewer. You may also save a picture that you took of an amazing sunset on the second day of you vacation for the last or next-to-last picture of the album, using it as a kind of climax to the story of your vacation (although, maybe it's just me who does this sort of thing).

Do you group all of the pictures of food together? There's a kind of organizational logic to this from the standpoint of the picture arranger. And yet, I would argue, it leads to an inferior experience for the picture viewer. There's a kind of tedium to seeing picture after picture of food. But if the pictures are placed among other events and thing - trips to the beach, happy people, monuments, etc. - then it might feel more like you are experiencing the vacation as the individual experienced it.

But one wonders how much time people spend on telling stories through Facebook. Would people care about having an abrupt ending to an album? The difference between telling a story and simply putting things up is something a viewer might pick up on, at least sub-consciously.

ABRUPT ENDING