Recording each other for justice

Each Saturday, a recurring conflict takes place outside of an abortion clinic, a conflict that sheds light on how media technologies raise questions about the ethics of surveillance and privacy. It's a good example of how these issues are not just about how governments and corporations monitor citizens and consumers, but how these questions arise from interactions among citizens. My understanding of precisely what occurs around the abortion clinic is based on anecdotal evidence, so take everything in this entry with a grain of salt. This is one of those phenomena that I'd love to devote more time to understanding, if only I had the time. There is a compelling ethnography waiting to be written about it, one that would be particularly relevant to communication law scholars.

The space outside the clinic is occupied by two groups: protesters seeking to persuade individuals entering the clinic not to get abortions, and a group of people (hereafter referred to as "defenders") seeking to protect or buffer individuals entering the clinic from harassment from the protesters. This particular arrangement of individuals could have occurred long before the advent of digital networked technologies. What I'm interested in is what happens when you add those tools to the mix.

Protesters are often seen using their phones to take pictures of defenders and the license plates of defenders' cars. Protesters are, by law (at least as far as I know), permitted to do this. Both the protesters and defenders occupy a public space, or at least a space that is not "private" in the sense that one's home is private. Protesters are not, as I understand it, allowed to take pictures of individuals entering the clinic, as this would violate their rights to privacy as patients of the clinic. Even though they are not yet inside the clinic, if they are on the clinic's property and they are patients, their rights to privacy extend to the area around the clinic. If defenders believe that protesters are engaging in unlawful picture-taking, the defenders will use their phones to video record the protesters taking pictures.

Predictably, tempers occasionally flare, voices are raised, people get in each others' faces, and when behavior that approaches the legal definition of harassment or assault occurs, everyone starts recording everything with their phones. The image of extremely worked-up people wielding cameras as one would wield a weapon, recording each other recording each other in a kind of infinite regress of surveillance, strikes me as ludicrous, partly because the act of recording someone with your phone makes you appear passive, somewhat nerdy, and almost...dainty.

What is the point of all this recording? In most cases, the intention seems to be to catch others in an act of law-breaking, to create a record of evidence to turn over to the police that could be admissible in a court of law. But in other cases (e.g., the protester's pictures of defenders' license plates), the intent seems to have little to do with the actual law. The police would have little interest in the license plate numbers of law-abiding citizens. So, why are they doing this, and what happens to these pictures?

Enter social networking sites (SNS). The pictures, as I understand it, are subsequently uploaded to a SNS group page which contains a collection of pictures of defenders and their license plates. It is possible for SNS users to make such groups "secret" and/or invitation-only, so that the groups could not be found by those in the pictures. My understanding is that this leads to those who are in the pictures disguising their identities online so as to infiltrate the secret groups, acting as moles.

But what is the point of developing these online inventories of people who are defenders or protesters or, for that matter, publicly state any particular belief? Is all of this just an intimidation technique? And if so, is it effective? Is there a kind of panoptic logic at work here, in which the fear comes from not knowing precisely who will see those pictures and in what context they will be seen (e.g., by a would-be employer 20 years from now)? Are they using the pictures as part of a concrete plan to take action against the individuals in the pictures, or is it not that well thought-out? Do people taking pictures and amassing inventories like this do so because they imagine that someday, the law will change, or collective sentiment will change, at which point it will becoming damning evidence that one was affiliated with a group that is then seen as abhorrent? Is it akin to a German taking a picture of a Nazi sympathizer in 1939, banking on the fact that while being a Nazi at that time was socially acceptable, it would not be so for long, and that when it became unacceptable, the picture could be used to discredit or blackmail the person?

I don't think this phenomenon is relegated to protesters or defenders of abortion. I often think of it in a much more benign context: traffic violations. Let's say I were to record individuals making illegal U turns (or not using their fricking blinkers). The police may not be interested in my small-stakes vigilantism, but what if I were to start to amass an online inventory that included recordings of lousy drivers caught in the act, and the database included their license plates and pictures of their faces. The judgment here isn't taking place in a court of law. It's a kind of public shaming via peer-to-peer surveillance.

Aside from questions of motivation, the phenomenon raises questions of legality and ethics. It's my understanding that it is okay to take pictures of other individuals in public places, and/or their cars and license plates, and post those pictures online as long as the individuals and cars were in public. Perhaps at some point, were someone to take thousands of pictures of someone leaving their office everyday, it becomes an illegal activity (stalking), but I imagine the line to be blurry (are two pictures okay? Is it only not okay when you've been told to stop?). But what if you only take a single picture of an individual in public, and that individual isn't breaking the law, but you put that picture together with pictures of many other people engaged in a similar activity in an effort to publicly shame them or intimidate them? That seems illegal, but how do you prove what the effort or intention really was? Would it qualify as defamation?

Maybe it hinges on whether or not someone is a public figure. If a protester was quoted in a newspaper or their picture was on the front page of the New York Times, then this seems like fair game. The individual in the paper might suffer negative consequences as a result of being widely known for his quote and his behavior, but what are we supposed to do, not allow the press to depict protesters? What if a blog quoted a protester and featured a picture of him? Functionally, the blog isn't much different than the newspaper, and the lines between the two are blurry. The case of the protester quoted in the New York Times is realistic but rare, whereas there will likely be a great many quotes and pictures on SNS of people stating all sorts of beliefs and doing all sorts of things that may be worthy of judgment to some people at some time.

Even if we decide it fits into a certain legal or ethical category, this may not matter if the behavior remains secret, if technology enables it but doesn't bring it to the surface (i.e., the problem of policing secret inventories).

One possibility is that the law has simply been outstripped by technology. In place of the law, people respond to unethical uses of technology with, you guessed it, more technology. In this case, technology developers make it harder to take surreptitious pictures of people by making it difficult to turn the camera shutter sound off on camera phones. Other tech developers have engineered clothing that reflects light back at cameras in such a way that renders their images invisible. It could be argued that we have been living in a world in which every step of the justice system now functions through technology outside of traditional channels of justice administration, and that the best thing we can do is acknowledge that reality and consider how best to create an ethical world given the imperfect state of things, at least for the foreseeable future.

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.

Mobile media revealing our selves to ourselves

Mobile phones have many, many purposes: entertainment, art, communication, education. One of the more controversial applications of this technology is using it for monitoring. When certain people have the ability to covertly monitor others while not being monitored themselves, there is a power imbalance. It is possible for those doing the monitoring to judge and punish those who they catch doing something bad when, in fact, this is something that they do themselves but no one is able to observe them doing it. I'm not sure this actually happens all that often or will be as likely to happen in the future as most people believe, but for the time being, let's assume this concern about mobile media as monitoring device is a valid one.

But what about self-monitoring? The possibility of using mobile technology for self-monitoring and self-feedback has not yet been fully realized, and I think it may help people overcome two significant obstacles to behavior change.

The first obstacle is being aware of the patterns in your own behavior: the environmental cues that cause you to unconsciously respond in a way that isn't in your long-term interests, the moods and thoughts that precede worse moods and thoughts. It will be tricky to use mobile tech to reveal these patterns without being too obtrusive. I've tried out some experience sampling technology on my phone and its hard to even get it to work right, and when it does work right, it may just be too much of a nuisance to put up with. It feels like one more thing you have to do, like a diet, and almost all diets fail. But its conceivable that you could design a less intrusive way of tracking thoughts, feelings, and behavior throughout the day.

The second is one I've been thinking about a lot: people do not like to be told what is good for them by others. They may be a bit more accepting of such advice if its coming from a trusted expert (say, a medical doctor), but even then, it doesn't feel good to be told what to do. People will start to look for reasons to doubt the expertise of the advice giver. If we give people the tools to make connections for themselves and to use that new knowledge to alter their choice environment, there is no external force telling them what to do. If anything, they are telling their selves, their future selves, what to do.

We all do this already. We resolve to do things in the future that are in our best long-term interests but then fail to do so in the face of temptation or distraction. Mobile media, because it is with us at all times in all contexts, can be a tool with which we cope with temptation and distraction. Ideally, it will not proscribe particular ways of being, but will merely be a tool for individuals to closely observe and then structure their lives.

Modern existence necessitates being part of an increasingly complex (i.e., hard to understand) set of interactions with an increasing number of people. It is difficult to know why you feel the way you feel, or do the things you do. Designing an unobtrusive, secure self-monitoring application and using it in tandem with some choice-limiting technology is a way to exist in such a society. Potentially, mobile tech is a layer of technology between all those aforementioned applications - entertainment, art, communication, education - and the self who is equipped with the older "technologies" of the brain, eyes, ears, and nose.

Living while distracted

As I walked hurriedly down South University on my way to catch a bus, fishing my headphones out of the jacket pocket as I went, I passed an older man who was standing still. He was holding his hands behind his back, idly gazing in the window of an ice cream shop while students whizzed by him on their way to class. His idleness struck me - what might he be thinking about all the people around him. In particular, what might he be thinking of me or any of the many students fiddling with Ipods and phones. The answer is: probably nothing (I tend to assume people are thinking about me when they're not, so egocentric am I), but it made for a productive jumping-off point for some musings on media distraction.

Media is an exceptional tool for distraction, perhaps the best that has ever existed. It is always available. It presents significant variety in terms of songs we can listen to, people we can text, shows we can watch, profiles we can check out. We can use it to distract ourselves (actively choosing the content or people we access) or we can be distracted by it (being confronted by people or content we didn't seek out). Usually, its some combination of the two: going to a site that links to some unexpectedly interesting other site, texting one person and getting a text from another, etc. All of it serves to take our minds off whatever we happened to be thinking about or feeling before. It distracts us.

Distraction has a bad reputation. First, it is other people's doing. We wouldn't choose to be distracted, but more and more, we are confronted with a distracting environment, cluttered with advertisements and solicitations. It prevents us from working efficiently, prevents us from thinking deeply or for sustained periods of time about problems which helps us to solve those problems (either personal or societal). It reduces us to attention-depleted pleasure junkies, incapable of reflection.

OK, fine. I'm not necessarily doubting this curmudgeonly way of thinking about our modern world, a view I probably falsely ascribed to the stationary man staring into the window of Stucchi's ice cream. But I think there is pleasure in distraction (or at least the potential reduction of pain). Its not something that advertisers forced upon us.

Jonah Lehrer cites the research of Walter Mischel on self-control, finding that the key to preventing yourself from indulging in something you desperately want but should not have is distraction (this is a gross oversimplification of it, but whatevs). Children were presented with a short-term reward - a marshmallow - and told that if they held out, they could receive a larger long-term reward (two marshmallows). Some kids were able to hold out, others were not. Those who were able to hold out, on average, went on to be more successful in life, having fewer behavioral problems, higher SAT scores, and better jobs.

What helped those children delay gratification wasn't that they desired the reward any less, but that they were skilled in the art of “strategic allocation of attention.” In Lerher's words, "instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the 'hot stimulus'—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from 'Sesame Street.' Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten." It isn't just that the children were distracted and that they resisted temptation b/c of this, but that they understood how their minds worked. They engaged in meta-cognition, and were able to make themselves think of something else to help them hold out for a long-term reward.

In other words, self-imposed distraction was good. It helped prevent the children from indulging in immediate gratification, helped them hold out for long-term rewards which, as it turns out, is a big part of succeeding at life. Could we then think of media as an aid in this process, a super-effective tool for self-distraction? When we are tempted to indulge in some immediate gratification that will hinder our abilities to succeed in the long run, if we pop on our ipod or distract ourselves with an episode of Glee or text a friend, all other things being equal, does that help prevent us from indulging?

There are other effects of this kind of use of media, ones that may hinder our abilities to achieve our long-term goals (lowered attention span, expecting positive and novel stimuli at the push of a button at all times, etc). But it is interesting to consider this particular incentive for using media, as a way of distracting ourselves from things that we should be distracting ourselves from, things that it would be in our best interest to forget about for a bit. If you distract yourself from working through an issue you have with, say, your father or your job, this isn't good. You should take time to reflect on those problems, think about how to resolve them in a way that benefits all parties. Otherwise, they will fester and grow bigger. But if you distract yourself from your immediate desires for the proverbial marshmallow, this may just help you hold out for long-term rewards. No amount of reflection on that desire will help you. its just rumination, perseveration. It helps no one.

How, then, to tell the difference between the two, between escapist distraction and beneficial distraction?

The Day the Texting Died

T-Mobile's services have been failing tonight. I discovered this when someone called me and told me that they were having trouble texting me. I then tried to send a text and it bounced back. Then, I tried to call T-Mobile customer support to find out if the problem was with my network. When I didn't get an answer (all agents busy, don't even bother hanging on, call back later), I knew it wasn't just me. I then googled T-Mobile news and got a story, posted within the previous 30 minutes, that T-Mobile was having massive outages. Kinda neat how I was able to find out how big the problem was so quickly.

Then, I went over to twitter (the news article in pcmag mentioned outraged phone users taking to twitter to register their disgust w/ tmobile). Indeed, it was clogged with complaints about T-Mobile. My first reaction was laughter. There was something that just struck me as funny about how upset people were about losing texting service. It was the kind of exaggerated outrage that pervades online fora (LOTS OF CAPS, EXPLETIVES, AND EXXXCLAMATION POINTS, DAMMITT!!!!!!). Maybe I felt entitled to laugh at this outrage (or self-parodying fake outrage (fauxtrage?)) b/c I was in the same boat as them. For me, it was a comically minor inconvenience, one that, frankly, prevented me from being distracted by getting into a text conversation (though here I am, avoiding my work by blogging, so maybe the outage didn't help my productivity after all).

Then I checked myself. It would be bad to laugh about a total failure of telephone lines. Phone lines are used by emergency units to save people's lives. While I know that it wasn't everyone who lost texting capabilities (I guess some lost voice, some lost both), it got me to thinking about what it would mean for lots of people to lose the ability to text for a night. Would there be anything seriously bad about that?

It got me to thinking about the overall character of texting. Is there really anything serious about it? There's the hyper-coordination, so an outage might mean a bunch of people would get slightly lost or be slightly late, and get ticked off at one another. I suppose it is possible that if someone didn't know about the outage and was waiting for a call or a text, they might think that the other person was ignoring them, causing stress in the relationship (maybe even the end of a (probably already tenuous) relationship?). Imagine that happening to thousands of people at once.

But really, I feel like the overall character (aside from coordination) of texting is joking, flirting, and gossiping. What would it mean to lose that for a night? One could study this in the way that Berelson (1962) studied what it meant to live without the newspaper for awhile back in the day. Maybe it'll be a nice moment of self-reflection for people. That's what its been for me.

More Technology in Our Lives = What, exactly?

This morning, I woke, flipped on the radio, stumbled out of be bed, turned off the radio, cracked open my laptop, checked my email, went to digg, and then remembered an article I'd been meaning to read about how people are using more technology (such as laptops and mobile devices) right when they wake up, before breakfast even.

I've had a lot of conversations like this article: we all agree that the internet and cell phones have changed the ways we live. We spend more time staring at these lil' screens that weren't in our lives 10 years ago, which certainly seems weird. But so what? "Weird" and "interesting" just doesn't cut it for me anymore. Before I can give this topic any more thought, I need to think of plausible positive and negative outcomes of networked technology use.

Let's start w/ the assumption that there are three levels of use: no use, light use, and heavy use.

1: Heavy use strengthens bonds with peers (friends & co-workers) but weakens bonds with family or domestic partners. This will lead to domestic dysfunction, resulting in increased rates of depression in all members of the household and will effect young children in the house especially negatively in terms of their cognitive and emotional development.

This seems to be behind the "technology eats into our family time" worries. Most of what people do w/ these devices IS social, so its not the worry that we might have when someone is playing video games by themselves or watching TV by themselves. To put it in Granovetter's terms, we might say that heavy use erodes our few strong ties and replaces them with many weak ties. For light users, weak ties are simply added to our social mix, but heavy users experience a weakening of the strong ties: less time w/ close ones, less sharing of deeply personal feelings, etc.

2: Heavy use cultivates a new kind of social bond, one that has some characteristics of a strong tie (lots of time devoted to a person, intimate knowledge of that person, tendency to share intimate secrets, similar interests and opinions) and some characteristics of a weak tie (not feeling bad if you can't make it to an important event in their lives, shorter in duration, more plentiful, not as many common links between the two). These new kinds of social ties are, on some unconscious level, easily mistaken for strong ties. The heavy user thinks they are creating a secure, lasting bond, but is actually creating a weak link that is as susceptible to dissolution as any other weak link. Over time, this leads to increased life dissatisfaction and decreased domestic harmony which leads to cognitively/emotionally deprived children.

It is important to note that this claim is not based solely on whether these people met online or IRL, or on whether one uses an online identity that is somehow linked to their real world identity (it is assumed that the online identity is linked to real-world identity in some way, as this is far more common a practice than sustained, anonymous relationships). The real question is: does your brain categorize the person as a member of the relatively small, real life community or as a member of the almost endless online community. I think that is determined in part by whether you met online or IRL, but also by the heavy use of networked technologies to maintain an existing bond, especially if that technology is used heavily in the early stages of the relationship. Part of your brain says, "this person is really close to me. They know things about me that no one else knows. We talk all the time. Our relationship is unique." Another part of your brain says, "there are other people whom I could communicate with in similar ways. Search technology is getting better and better. Perhaps I could find someone who is like this person, but without those annoying flaws and incompatibilities." That part of the brain assembles a composite friend or mate from various blogs, videos, articles, and internet detritus, thinking "these super-cool characteristics exist out there, and they're real. They're not just some fabrication of Hollywood screenwriters. Its realistic to think that there's a person with those characteristics."

This leads to a kind of cognitive dissonance, or worse, an inability to see what is creating the dissatisfaction. Heavy users may start to think of themselves as the kinds of people who weren't meant to have many close friends, as transient, somewhat alienated individuals who are a bit unhappy, but are resigned to their fates and have hope of achieving some kind of domestic bliss in the distant future once they "meet the right person." Really, they are different than a person who has achieved that domestic harmony not in terms of who their core selves are, but only in terms of the ways they chose to communicate and form bonds with others. If a link between heavy use of networked technologies and long-term life dissatisfaction (or domestic harmony, in which kidz suffer somehow) could be made apparent, then a heavy users might have something outside of their own flawed abilities to tell the difference between a strong tie and a weak one, who is compatible and who is not.

3. Those who do not use networked technologies will feel an increased sense of alienation and depression. Because they're not in the social loop, they get the feeling that people are talking about them behind their backs (which may or may not be true), they don't get invited to as many social events, and generally are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to forming strong or weak ties. They meet people in real life, but when they refuse to maintain that relationship w/ networked technologies, the relationship withers, as the other person thinks, "this is just too hard to maintain. Its easier to bond with this other person who is more social." I wonder about this possibility every time I hear someone say "I'm not going to let my kid have a cell phone or a facebook account no matter what his or her friends have!"

So, one important project would be to re-examine what is meant by "strong tie" and "weak tie." Lots of sociological work, including everything derived from Robert Putnam's work, makes certain assumptions about the characteristics of these ties that need to be rethought. And then, how the fuck do we go about measuring any of this? I suppose Putnam's and Granovetter's studies lay the groundwork. Is it just a matter of asking how much you use social media, how happy you are, and including the right moderating/mediating variables? How do you teaste out the personality traits and worldviews that result in low life satisfaction from the use variables? Maybe some focus groups with heavy users in which we discuss relationship satisfaction would be a first step. In any case, this will all take years to play out. Part of my claim is that the duration of strong ties will be shorter, maybe 5 years average as opposed to 10 or 20.

Pros and Cons of Road Tripping w/ IPhones

Just got back from a road trip from Ann Arbor to Missoula. I was accompanied by two good friends, one of which had an IPhone, the other of which had a Blackberry. I have neither of these mobile technologies. Due to the sudden and complete immersion into a social atmosphere in a limited physical space (my car) in which the distribution of technology was unequeal, I came away with some thoughts on what the technologies mean/do to us.

First off, its silly to say that the technology is good or bad. It is both. The better questions are: "when do these technologies cause social or emotional tension and when do they provide enjoyable experiences for the group or the individual?"

I pointed out to my friends that the use of these phones was stunting conversation in the car and thus making the trip worse for (at the very least) me and potentially alienating us from one another (we don't hang out very often b/c we live in different cities). I felt doubly alienated b/c I didn't know what they were doing on the phones. Were they playing a video game, reading an article, talking to someone else? I felt like I wasn't entertaining enough to be chosen over these other options, which was annoying. They informed me that they were mostly checking and responding to work email. They acknowledged my concerns, but said they wouldn't be able to take vacations like this unless they had devices on whcih to check in on work. Thus, they viewed the phones as enabling more vacation time, more social flexibility, which would make up for the minimal tension created when they both logged on and I sat there doing nothing.

Other times, the phones were used to answer questions, as kind of an Oracle to defer to, to settle disputes. We would argue over how geographers determined where the exact center of the United States was, or who an actor was in a TV show, and instead of going back and forth, we ventured guesses and then confirmed them using the internet. There's something about always having this technology with you (especially if you're out of the house often) that makes its impact on conversations, disputes, and knowledge that much more profound. Most often, we'd have a conversation about anything, then look up something related on wikipedia, and cite some obscure, amusing, related fact. So it was sort of an augmented conversation. I learned more, but it did seem to suck the spontineity out of the conversation at times. And there's something troubling about people citing jokes from the internet instead of making their own.

But the best/worst thing about them was their abilities to navigate. We had a big road atlas which we used, sometimes as a primary source of navigation and other times as a backup to the IPhone. We were aware of the hazards of using the IPhone or GPS as exclusive navigation device. The interesting thing is that those devices have deficiencies (inability to take into account some things a long term resident might know, like the tendency of a resident to park their car too close to the road, thus blocking us from passing) but every deficiency could be corrected if the technology is sufficietly open. The IPhone led us to a closed-for-repair pizza joint in Chicago and a blocked dirt road in Montana. But if someone had been able to upload their personal knowledge of those places and it had instantly updated and been registered in a program that looks for patterns, then the device could incorporate the "folk wisdom" of local residents and been more effective. It was easy to say "there you go, making a false idol out of technology. Nothing will be as good as good ol' fashion human intuition," but I think that misses the point.

In the end, I don't think that the technological inequality detrimentally affected the social vibe in the car. We talked about as much as I would be happy w/ (a lot, to the point where if we talked any more, I would've lost my voice). If I had to venture one possible effect the technology had on the content of our conversations, it was the promotion of non-personal subjects over personal ones. You can't look on the internet for how you feel about something or something about your personal life, but you can look on it for just about everything else. You can even look up people you know on Facebook while talking about them, but that won't tell you how you feel about them. We never really talked too deeply about our personal lives, but maybe that's b/c we've always tended to joke around and debate various topics instead of getting all touchy-feely. Though maybe the tendencies of guys to use mobile technology around one another in certain ways, e.g. to look up stuff, is different from girls' tendencies to do this and that augments a pre-existing gap between single-gender groups in terms of how touchy-feely they get in conversations.

If nothing else, I wasn't sold on the idea of either of these technologies being worth what they're priced at. When I'm sitting at home by myself, its nice to have TV and internet. They are, in some sense, competing w/ books or me staring into space and being introspective. Mobile technologies like the IPhone, for me, would be competing w/ music, podcasts, NPR, and talking to other people, all of which cost me pretty much nothing and all of which kick ass.

Hanging out in Ye Olde Towne Square

I was chatting with a friend this evening about the proliferation of cellphones in other countries, specifically Mexico. As is the case with a lot of Non-US towns, many towns in Mexico made the leap from very few telephones to tons of cellphones, skipping the intermediary step of many household land-lines. She was saying that before the rise of cellphones, young people would go to the town square to hang out at night. You could count on seeing your friends and peers at the square, and you couldn't really make plans to hang out in smaller groups at more specific places because you lacked the means to coordinate plans on short notice.

I'd never really thought about it before, but phones and email allow young people the opportunity to make plans to hang out. I suppose you would also see people at school and make plans there to hang out later, but the point is that you'd always have to be somewhere where there were a lot of people in order to see your friends. For older people, the pub or the coffee house were the places where you would see your peers and socialize. Once you introduce phones, you allow people the means to selectively hang out with certain people while avoiding others. Its not that we don't go to public places like bars or malls anymore, but I wouldn't be surprised if hanging out with small groups of friends substituted for hanging out with larger groups in public, especially in places where they went from having no means of communicating with peers to everyone having a device that allows people to coordinate plans on very short notice.

I'd always thought of the influence of cellphones on the public sphere in terms of the actual number of people you talked to, or how long you talked to them for. But now, I'm prompted to consider how phones are used to make plans for meeting in physical space and how those plans are different than the ones you could've made without that device.

What are the implications of this? You'd be less apt to see extreme differences in the US. We've had phones for quite some time, and the adoption of phones was concurrent with the adoption of many other domestic technologies (namely the television) which might've contributed to the destruction of the public square as a social hub. But in a place where they had television, film, and radio already and then suddenly get cellphones, you might see a drastic change in the hanging-out habits of youngsters.

Of course, we now have online equivalents of the public square in the form of Facebook and other social networks and fora. But what about the places where accessing those online public squares is difficult (maybe b/c they've got cellphones that can't access the internet or that make it much easier to communicate P2P but not in groups)? Its important to pull apart these two 21st century technologies - cellphone and internet - and examine their influences on societies independent of one another. If you've got no public space to see your peers, would you have a strong sense of community with those who lived around you, with your town, with your country?