Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces

Locational Privacy, Control, and Urban Sociability

Adriana de Souza e Silva, Jordan Frith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415888233
• eBook ISBN: 9781136342561
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Mobile phones are no longer what they used to be. Not only can users connect to the Internet anywhere and anytime, they can also use their devices to map their precise geographic coordinates – and access location-specific information like restaurant reviews, historical information, and locations of other people nearby. The proliferation of location-aware mobile technologies calls for a new understanding of how we define public spaces, how we deal with locational privacy, and how networks of power are developed today.

In Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces, Adriana de Souza E. Silva and Jordan Frith examine these social and spatial changes by framing the development of location-aware technology within the context of other mobile and portable technologies such as the book, the Walkman, the iPod, and the mobile phone. These technologies work as interfaces to public spaces – that is, as symbolic systems that not only filter information but also reshape communication relationships and the environment in which social interaction takes place. Yet rather than detaching people from their surroundings, the authors suggest that location-aware technologies may ultimately strengthen our connections to locations.

Section I

Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces

1

Interfaces to Public Spaces

Johanna is waiting for her flight, sitting at her gate among a crowd of people. She never liked airports. Airports are weird places: They contain mostly people who are strangers to each other, and who are constantly on the move, coming and going. Johanna feels uncomfortable and intimidated by the strangers around her. The couple sitting behind her are arguing, not especially loudly, but loudly enough that she can hear every word they say. Johanna has been trying to read, but she decides to give up on her book because she cannot concentrate with everything going on around her. She puts her book down, reaches into her backpack and takes out her iPod. She then puts her headphones on and turns her music up so that she can stop paying attention to the couple’s angry conversation.

The first song that comes through her headphones is a soft, acoustic song from one of her favorite songwriters. She loves that song, but the busy airport space doesn’t quite match the song’s slow-paced rhythm, so she changes to a faster song. Replacing the sounds of the airport with a familiar melody helps her feel more comfortable in that space. She spends the next ten minutes listening to music and watching strangers as they make their way past their gate. Soon she notes on the monitors above her head that it is time for her to board. She turns off the iPod, and walks to her gate.

When we experience a place, we do so through our body, which acts as a layer between a place and our perception of it. We also develop techniques to filter the information around us, further interfacing our experiences. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in public spaces and urban areas. The crowded streets of the city contain so much action, so much information, that we constantly enact ways to mentally filter those places, choosing one thing to focus on over another. In other words, we find new ways to manage attention (Benjamin, 1980 [1929]; Goldhaber, 2006; Lanham, 2006). Managing attention has become increasingly important not only with the growth of urban spaces, but also of digital spaces. Richard Lanham (2006) has claimed that attention is a scarce commodity in today’s digital society. With the growth of the Internet and other communication channels, we are being overloaded with information. He writes that, “In an information society, the scarce commodity is not information—we are choking on that—but the human attention required to make sense of it” (Lanham, 1997, p. 164). Lanham (2006) later called this the new economics of attention, arguing that because there is so much stimulation in the information society, keeping viewers’ attention takes precedence over everything else. Similarly, Goldhaber (2006) suggests that “in an attention economy, one is never not on, at least when one is awake, since one is nearly always paying, getting or seeking attention, in ways and modes that are increasingly organized and tend to involve ever-large and more dispersed audiences” (n.p.). In the digital age, people are accessing increasing amounts of information. They are stimulated in new and diverse ways, and therefore feel the need to develop new mechanisms to manage their attention and decide what to absorb from the world around them.

We are certainly not living through the first era to face what is perceived as information overload. Discussing the development of the printing press, Michael Hobart and Zachary Schiffman (1998) write that “printing gave individuals access to a previously unimaginable number of books, overloading them with diverse and contradictory information” (p. 89). People living in the sixteenth century responded by developing new ways to organize information and attention, most notably in the forms of lists such as bibliographies and indexes. The authors point out that lists are a definite sign of information overload, and the sixteenth century stands “as one of the great ages of list making” (Hobart & Schiffman, 1998, p. 104).

However, as Jonathan Crary (2001) points out, the idea of attention itself is a nineteenth-century construction. The process of modernization, and along with it the growth of the modern city, brought the problem of attention to the foreground of modern urban life. It was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that “inattention … began to be treated as a danger and a serious problem, even though it was often the very modernized arrangements of labor that produced inattention” (Crary, 2001, p. 13). As Crary observes, the problem of attention emerged from a social and urban field increasingly saturated with sensory input. Urbanites moved through city streets that had become increasingly crowded, increasingly filled with sensory stimulation. Writing about these early nineteenth- and twentieth-century urbanites, Georg Simmel (1950) argued that the metropolitan man [sic] had to develop new ways to deal with the sensory stimulation of the city. He claimed individuals did this by reconstituting their psychic state, reformatting their attention by, in a sense, fragmenting their space; in other words, they developed new ways to filter their experience of the city. Simmel called this development the blasé attitude, arguing that urban individuals developed “an organ” that helped them deal with the stimulation of the city. The organ represented a new, intellectually refined approach to urban space. As Simmel (1950) says, “He [the metropolitan man] reacts with his head instead of his heart” (p. 410). The metaphorical organ Simmel describes is basically a filter between the sensory stimulation of the city and the mind of the metropolitan individual. In other words, it was a medium—or, as we suggest, a type of mental interface—that helped individuals manage their interactions with the urban environment.

While Simmel discussed the mental attitude of the metropolitan individual as a way to filter urban spaces, people have often used mobile technologies to accomplish a similar same goal. The blasé attitude as a technique and mobile media as technologies both are used by urban individuals to interface with the urban environment and to manage their experiences. For this reason, mobile technologies work as interfaces to public spaces. Going as far back as the development of the habit of reading in public spaces (Manguel, 1997; Schivelbusch, 1986), people have used mobile interfaces—such as books and newspapers—to alter the way they perceive public spaces and how they manage their interactions with other people and things in those spaces. By reading a book on public transit, individuals can divert their attention away from their surroundings, focusing on the narrative of a novel rather than the stimulation of the place. With the development of auditory personal mobile technologies, especially the Walkman and the iPod, it became even easier for people to enact a technologically enabled filter that helped them choose how to engage with public space. These technologies have often been accused of diverting people’s attention and causing them to ignore the physical space and the people around them. However, undivided attention (to people, to spaces) is an unachievable, idealized goal. In reality, our attention spans cycle through different things and environments—and mobile technologies help people manage these cycles.

It has been common for scholars to argue that mobile technology use “withdraws” people from public space (Gergen, 2002; Goldberg, 2007; Puro, 2002), an argument we address throughout this book.¹ In this chapter, we address this concern by showing that people do not just use these technologies to “withdraw” from space. Rather, people often use mobile technologies to accomplish a similar goal as the blasé attitude: interface their relationships with other people and the space around them. We use the examples of three types of personal mobile technologies—the book, the Walkman, and the iPod—to show how they can be analyzed as interfaces that help people manage and control their interaction with the public spaces around them. In these first two chapters, we focus on these three monologic mobile technologies. From Chapter 3 on we focus on mobile phones and location-aware technologies as dialogic forms of mobile media, discussing how newer mobile technologies complicate these arguments. For now, we look at the book, the Walkman, and the iPod as a way to develop our argument about mobile technologies as interfaces to urban spaces. Whereas with Simmel’s (1950) blasé attitude the metropolitan man “reacts with his head instead of his heart” (p. 410), when people move through space with a mobile technology such as the Walkman, they “react with their head(phones) instead of their heart.”

This chapter examines urban sociability as it relates to the use of these mobile technologies and develops a conceptual framework for understanding how and why individuals use mobile technologies in public spaces. To do so, we first examine issues of urban sociability by discussing two interrelated areas: (1) the growth of the modern city and how it has affected urban sociability; and (2) the ways people have longed to control their experience of urban spaces. Rather than arguing that mobile technologies themselves create a need to exert control over heterogeneity in the city, we instead believe that people have always longed to control both the built environment and their interactions with other people in public. We then move on to analyze mobile technology use and argue that through books and auditory media, individuals are able to enact a more controlled form of engagement with the stimulation of urban spaces. Just like with Simmel’s psychological filter, individuals turn toward mobile interfaces not as a way to completely distance themselves from the experience of the city, but rather to choreograph an economy of attention that simultaneously distances and re-approximates them from urban spaces.

The Growth of the Modern Metropolis and the Decline of Public Life

In 1938, Louis Wirth wrote that “the growth of cities and the urbanization of the world is one of the most impressive facts of modern times” (p. 2). Wirth’s words still ring true more than 70 years later, and the process of urbanization has continued more or less unchecked through the first decade of the twenty-first century. The move from rural to urban changed the ways in which people organize their daily lives, and more recently, the move toward megalopolises has reorganized urban life even more noticeably. In Mexico City, for example, Néstor Garcia Canclini (2001) has shown that the enormous growth of cities has made it difficult for its citizens to even identify themselves as residents of the city; instead, they often identify with the section of the city in which they live because the city as a whole is simply too large to have much meaning as a place of residence. Similar situations occur in other megacities, such as São Paulo, Tokyo, and New York. The growth and sprawl of the built environment has also changed the way in which people negotiate the urban. Canclini (2001) discusses how the fractured nature of megacities has led to a confusion of identity and a shift toward more a private experience because public spaces have become less and less effective as pleasant sites of social interaction. Faced with the growth of global metropolises, it becomes important to return to Wirth’s proclamation and examine how the built environment of cities over the last three centuries has changed the way in which people engage with urban areas.

Cities underwent a massive transformation around the time of the Industrial Revolution. From 1595 to the middle of the eighteenth century, the population of London grew from 315,000 to 750,000. In the nineteenth century alone, following the growth of industrialization, the population of London grew to over five million people (Sennett, 1977, p. 50). Other major cities, such as Paris and New York followed a similar trend, and much of the migration to urban areas came from rural towns. The new generations of city dwellers were confronted with an unfamiliar situation: No longer did they know the people they passed by on a daily basis, and the shift from rural to urban demanded new forms of sociability. Erving Goffman (1963) describes those demands well in his formulation of the “nod line”:

In Anglo-American society there exists a kind of “nod line” that can be drawn at a particular point through a rank order of communities according to size. Any community below the line, and hence below a certain size, will subject its adults, whether acquainted or not, to mutual greetings; any community above the line will free all pairs of unacquainted persons from this obligation.

(pp. 132–133)

With the rapid population growth of urban areas, the streets of the metropolis fell far above Goffman’s nod line. In contrast, in rural communities and smaller cities, most people still know each other or at least know of each other. As Goffman describes, they acknowledge each other’s presence because it would be rude not to do so and because it is likely they will run into each other again. However, with the increasing migration from rural to urban areas, for the first time most people lived in a place where they did not know the vast majority of people they saw daily. The public spaces of the city demanded that urban individuals develop new social techniques to manage the stimulation of city streets and to interact with strangers.

Ultimately, much more than in rural communities, the city is where we come into contact with strangers, and through that contact we ideally learn from others who do not share our backgrounds and experiences, or as Sennett (1992) puts it: “A city ought to be a school for learning how to lead a centered life. Through exposure to others, we might learn how to weigh what is important and what is not” (p. xiii). Before the growth of vast urban areas, the benefits offered by the private spaces of the home, tight-knit community in rural communities and smaller cities were more clearly demarcated from the benefits offered by the public spaces of the city, and each served its own purpose (Sennett, 1977). Private communities were places for strong emotional attachments; public places were where individuals interacted with others on a less personal level, but it was this less personal level that allowed for people to learn from others and expand past their tight-knit, typically homogenous groups.

Sennett’s major argument in The Fall of Public Man (1977) is that the balance between private and public has suffered in the last century and a half of urban life, with the private coming to dominate the public. Sennett attributes this change to the growth of personality in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Individuals turned inward because of a growing narcissism that valued personally meaningful interactions as the only interactions worth having. However, as Claude Fischer (2005) has argued, this turn away from the public and toward tight-knit, more private groups is not necessarily a growth in individualism; instead, it is a turn more toward social privatism. Fischer writes that what we observe is a desire to engage with “a more private world of family, work, and friends—a story of greater, but still social, privatism” (p. 6). It is not that people become hermits or turn away from society. Instead, they eschew the more uncontrolled interactions with strangers in the city for the more controlled interactions of family and close friends.

Whether we label it social privatism or individualism, the argument remains much the same. Over the last 200 years, the private began to encroach on the public, with individuals turning away from public spaces because the interactions with strangers could not fulfill their desires in the same way that private interactions could. The growth of the city was a partial cause of this change, as the more controlled public life of eighteenth-century cafes turned into the crowded city streets outlined most famously by Baudelaire’s (1964) concept of the flâneur. Individuals came to value the emotional attachments of community and the home at the expen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section I : Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces
• Section II : Location-awareness in the Contemporary City
• Conclusion: Near Futures and the Immediate Present
• Index