“Is is always was…next.”
– Graffiti at MIT
“Do you want this marriage to work or not?"
This guy – a total stranger – was asking the question with the intensity of a spurned lover. Of course, I had my own opinion about it but I kept my thoughts to myself like the ten or so other people who had also been listening to his ongoing negotiation. It was a complex relationship involving kids and in-laws and a possible crime worthy of a soap but we were all involved in simply because he happened to be standing on line with us at the bank while on his cell phone. Even being called up to the counter did not interrupt his call and I was curious enough about the outcome to wait for an adjacent window so I could overhear the resolution. Why not? I was already deeply involved in his conjugal affairs, which were a lot more interesting than my financial ones.
I plead guilty to the belief that literature is merely gossip that sticks; unfolding stories of any kind are inherently fascinating. Hence reality TV. But this was not a case of blatant snooping. I had no option but to overhear his conversation, since he made no attempt to muffle his remarks or modulate his voice. And because he was using a Bluetooth earpiece, he might just as well have been speaking to any one of us. In fact he seemed oblivious to the distinction between his inner and outer world as he carried on this very private conversation in public. At one point, he looked at me looking at him and may or may not have even seen me there.
The most striking thing was not that he was forcing me to listen in. That is typical of life on any city street and I am accustomed to wandering through snippets of other people's cellular monologues. Chalk it up to irritainment…pervasively annoying media of all kinds.
What intrigued me was that he continued the conversation while conducting a complicated transaction with the bank teller. Wasn't the relationship important enough to deserve his full attention for a few moments? And if not, wasn’t his money? Still, romantic at heart, I was rooting for a reconciliation as he continued to deliberate.
This conflict between private and public communication is part of the next iteration of the Gizmos as cell phones take over communication. But it is an old story in fact. Newspapers, for example, have always tested a similar thin line between reportage and libel. Nathaniel Butter and Nicholas Bourne were the principal publishers of corantos in England throughout the 1620s. These newsheets were popular because, as the name suggested, they promised current news. But it did not take long for the line to be crossed. By 1632 they were suppressed by the government because of pressure from the Spanish ambassador who was personally offended by information regarding the royal house of Austria.
All new technologies of communication raise this issue as they make it easier for private information to slip into the public realm. Tape recordings of personal conversations from presidents to mobsters continue to challenge our legal notions on the subject. And the popularity of talk radio and reality TV has ushered in a whole new Age of Divulgence. It is not surprising then that phones too are implicated in this shifting sensibility, given that there are over 4 billion of them in use worldwide.
The public phone I grew up with was housed in a booth with doors that closed. It was meant to be an intimate space; Clark Kent even changed clothes there. In Manhattan there are no booths on the street anymore, only as few metal shells that could barely contain a rumor. Instead of stepping away from the street for privacy, the street itself has become the conversation space. But rudeness is not the force behind this annexation of public space...connectivity is. People on the phone are actually engulfed in a dual reality, the conversation in that world and the body in this one. This is a weird place to be but it is increasingly becoming a natural space to inhabit.
It is in fact harder on the overhearer because it challenges the etiquette of listening which is ambiguous at best. The responsibility for controlling private information has shifted from the phoner to everyone else. It is no longer their job to be discreet, it is up to each of to listen or not.
Again, this is nothing new in the evolution of the Gizmos. Even in the early days of telephonics, all sorts of social interactions were called into question. How, for instance, to address a person whose class you could not determine from observation…first name, last name, title? How to acknowledge the caller…with the formal “greetings”, a casual “hello”, a jaunty “howdy?” Bell himself favored the international nautical word “ahoy!” Every country eventually settled on its own salutation: Americans say “hello,” Italians “pronto,” Spanish “bueno.”
The issue was even raised by the very first phone call ever made on March 10, 1876. In the Hollywood version we have come to cherish, Alexander Graham Bell shouts into the phone "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!" because he has spilled acid on his pants. This version – with its very modern sharing of private pain – is based on Watson's autobiography written 50 years after the event. The actual episode, however, was no doubt more accurately described in Bell's own notebook written at the time. By that account, there was no acid. Bell simply announced "Mr. Watson – Come here – I want to see you" into the apparatus. Not a personal plea for help at all, just an pronouncement for posterity. Yet it is the more intimate one that resonates and stays with us.
Not to worry,
As always when these shifts occur, a new set of manners and codes will emerge, an etiquette to tell us how to be polite all over again. Elephants have infrasound, whales have megasonar, and we have 25,000 satellites orbiting the earth, thousands of miles of fiber optic cables coursing through it, a deep wind of electromagnetic signals bathing all of it just to speed up and crank up the chatter. There is just too much to say to stay silent.
By the way, the final words I heard as we stepped away from our prospective windows at the bank that day were "Good, then I'll see you at 7:00,” as he left.
I was relieved that it was going to work out after all.
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