Conversation and Convenience (9 Sept 2010)

A few prefatory remarks: I dislike talking on the phone and generally avoid it if I can. I dislike voice mail even more, a moribund technology that I wish would be discontinued so that those behind the curve don't accidentally use it and expect people to listen to their messages. I am not proud of my attitudes though, despite frequently airing them. These attitudes reflect my fear of being engaged in a conversation I can't control, having to expending my precious time on discourse from another human being that I can't skim through. Not to be overdramatic, but I think I am in some small way psychically murdering those people who are trying to reach me when I refuse to listen to their messages, when I choose my convenience over their relative inarticulateness and the slowness of the technology they have chosen to use. The same goes for timeshifting the act of conversation so that it can cease to be reciprocal and take the form of broadcasting. It's a casual act of cruelty to deny that reciprocity, to withhold the possibility of spontaneous sympathy and understanding.

It makes me think of that section of My Dinner With Andre in which Andre talks about having to endure small talk while he was in the midst of watching his mother die.

ANDRE: [Long pause.] Well, you know, I may be in a very emotional state right now, Wally, but since I've come back home, I've just been finding the world we're living in more and more upsetting. I mean. Last week I went down to the public theater one afternoon. You know, when I walked in I said "hello" to everybody, 'cause I know them all and they all know me, and they're always very friendly. You know that seven or eight people told me how wonderful I looked, and then one person, one, a woman who runs the casting office, said: "Gee, you look horrible! Is something wrong?" Now she, we started talking, of course I started telling her things, and she suddenly burst into tears because an aunt of hers, who's eighty, whom she's very fond of, went into the hospital for a cataract, which was solved, but the nurse was so sloppy she didn't put the bed rails up, so the aunt fell out of bed and is now a complete cripple! So, you know, we were talking about hospitals. Now, you know, this woman, because of who she is, you know, 'cause this had happened to her very, very recently, she could see me with complete clarity. [Wally says "Un-hunh."] She didn't know anything about what I've been going through. But the other people, what they saw was this tan or this shirt, or the fact that the shirt goes well with the tan, so they say: "Gee, you look wonderful!" Now, they're living in an insane dream world! They're not looking. That seems very strange to me.

WALLY: Right, because they just didn't see anything somehow, except the few little things that they wanted to see.

ANDRE: Yeah. You know, it's like what happened just before my mother died. You know, we'd gone to the hospital to see my mother, and I went in to see her. And I saw this woman who looked as bad as any survivor of Auschwitz or Dachau. And I was out in the hall, sort of comforting my father, when a doctor who is a specialist in a problem that she had with her arm, went into her room and came out just beaming. And he said: "Boy! Don't we have a lot of reason to feel great! Isn't it wonderful how she's coming along!" Now, all he saw was the arm, that's all he saw. Now, here's another person who's existing in a dream. Who on top of that is a kind of butcher, who's committing a kind of familial murder, because when he comes out of that room he psychically kills us by taking us into a dream world, where we become confused and frightened. Because the moment before we saw somebody who already looked dead and now here comes a specialist who tells us they're in wonderful shape! I mean, you know, they were literally driving my father crazy. I mean, you know, here's an eighty-two-year-old man who's very emotional, and, you know, if you go in one moment, and you see the person's dying, and you don't want them to die, and then a doctor comes out five minutes later and tells you they're in wonderful shape! I mean, you know, you can go crazy!

WALLY: Yeah, I know what you mean.

ANDRE: I mean, the doctor didn't see my mother. People at the public theater didn't see me. I mean, we're just walking around in some kind of fog. I think we're all in a trance! We're walking around like zombies! I don't think we're even aware of ourselves or our own reaction to things, we're just going around all day like unconscious machines, I mean, while there's all of this rage and worry and uneasiness just building up and building up inside us!

I think our communication devices are making it harder to escape the dream world; it's making us all conversational butchers who deny one another's reality because we can't be bothered to look beyond our own fantasia. And signs of the resultant passive-aggressive hostility seem to be everywhere -- to me anyway, it seems obvious in myself, when I find myself cursing at my phone like I have Tourette's because it tells me there is a voice mail for me to listen to. I know then that I live in an insane dream world.

Not everyone sees it this way. At the Economist's Free Exchange blog, Ryan Avent responds to a Kevin Drum post about hating the phone. Avent defends the drift toward textual communications:

Younger people want to talk on the phone less because the opportunity cost of setting everything else aside is higher, and because the substitutes for phone conversations are better than ever.

At any given moment, I'm carrying on many, many different conversations. Some of these conversations are conducted through blog arguments. Others, via email. Still others take place using instant messaging or Twitter. Other people use other modes—Facebook, Flickr, comment threads, and probably other social network tools I've not heard of. But what all these options have in common is that the participants in the discussions can engage in them at their convenience. I can return an email whenever I have a spare moment....

A phone call, on the other hand, requires both participants to be talking to each other in real time.... time spent on a constrictive phone call is time not spent on the many other conversations an individual has going.

Of course, this takes some getting used to. What is actually an increase in productivity feels to those used to long phone calls like an overwhelming and thought eviscerating wave of distraction. Plus, it's hard to hear over cell phones! But if phone calls feel burdensome to young people, it's because they're often actually burdensome. And the conversion of a convenience into a burden is representative, above all else, of progress.

Here I must disagree with Avent. I don't regard the experience of convenience or lack of it as an automatic indication of "progress." I think putting a private illusion of productivity ahead of the fostering of a shared psychic space through conversation is a terrible mistake, an inhumane selfishness that our gadgets make all too easy for us to indulge. I don't think the ability to conduct "conversations" at our convenience is especially beneficial. It erodes the very concept of social reciprocity, of necessarily willed attention in the moment, even if it is against one's inclination. If there is to be a meaningful public sphere, it requires resistance, friction, argument, confrontation. It requires inconvenience, the inconvenience of focusing our attention most of all. It requires the difficulty that Jonah Lehrer talks about here with regard to e-readers.

I’d love them to include a feature that allows us to undo their ease, to make the act of reading just a little bit more difficult. Perhaps we need to alter the fonts, or reduce the contrast, or invert the monochrome color scheme. Our eyes will need to struggle, and we’ll certainly read slower, but that’s the point: Only then will we process the text a little less unconsciously, with less reliance on the ventral pathway. We won’t just scan the words – we will contemplate their meaning.

Difficulty prompts contemplation. It disrupts the insane dream world; it forbids the caustic solipsism that ultimately doesn't even serve ourselves, but shuts us in a crypt of incomparable and thus impotent self-regard.

The more convenience we introduce to conversation, the more we're winnowing away the difficulties that preserve the possibilities of discourse. Instead we get a simulation of communication that precludes a confrontation with anything outside the dream world, and makes sure that the world we share with others will not change in any meaningful way. Convenient communication lets existing power relations further entrench themselves; the convenience assures that discussions of their inequity can never be broached.

Ringtones (11 April 2010)

Do ringtones still matter? Are they vanishing? Do iPhones even ring?

The other day I mistook the ringing of someone else's phone for my own while I was getting lunch, and it started me thinking about them. I used to have sort of knee-jerk view about them, and the idiocy of paying money to have a distinctive, attention-grabbing tone for one's cell phone. (I almost never have the ringer on, and I find it almost pathologically embarrassing when I forget and it rings in public; it makes me feel as though my zipper is open or something.) But the ringtone phenomenon is probably indicative of something other than hypostatizing vanity. They are an emblem of the way we can be singled out as individuals in public places, the way we are almost compelled to carry around our individual identity with us as we traverse the public sphere. If we are going to be accessible at all times, and that seems increasingly to be the default, then it follows that one should have a unique-seeming tone by which to be hailed. The wireless technology that makes us more or less permanently available prompts the end of shared public space, making it field of contested, vying privacies. It seems like that trend will become more pronounced with "augmented reality" applications that allow you to filter the space you are in through a portable device that tags everything around you according to your inclinations. The same space will be experienced privately by each individual passing through it. The ringtone is one of the first ramification of that shift.

Blabber jammers (5 Nov 2007)

A friend forwarded me this NYT article about semi-outlaw devices you can buy to jam cell-phone transmissions, an aggressive tactic in the guerrilla war to reclaim public space.

As cellphone use has skyrocketed, making it hard to avoid hearing half a conversation in many public places, a small but growing band of rebels is turning to a blunt countermeasure: the cellphone jammer, a gadget that renders nearby mobile devices impotent.

The technology is not new, but overseas exporters of jammers say demand is rising and they are sending hundreds of them a month into the United States — prompting scrutiny from federal regulators and new concern last week from the cellphone industry. The buyers include owners of cafes and hair salons, hoteliers, public speakers, theater operators, bus drivers and, increasingly, commuters on public transportation.

The development is creating a battle for control of the airspace within earshot. And the damage is collateral. Insensitive talkers impose their racket on the defenseless, while jammers punish not just the offender, but also more discreet chatterers.

An either clueless or totally disingenuous Verizon spokesman is quoted: "It’s counterintuitive that when the demand is clear and strong from wireless consumers for improved cell coverage, that these kinds of devices are finding a market.” Actually, it's completely intuitive. People want to talk into their own phones, and they don't want to be disrupted by other people talking into their phones. Nobody cares about cell coverage for people other than themselves, except for maybe the people they are trying to call. And nothing angers people more than strangers who don't acknowledge their existence, yet using a cell phone indiscreetly -- in public, with no attempt to remove oneself from shared space -- showcases that indifference to the existence of others. It's a way of demonstrating just how entitled you feel to claim every place you go as your own private space. There's a reason that when telephones were first introduced, they were placed in booths; it was inconceivably rude that you would conduct a conversation in the presence of others that would pointedly not include them. No one in their right mind would want the ability to carry out such conversations.

But technology's reach and the insidious promotion of personal convenience over common courtesy and civic cooperation has made the unthinkable ubiquitous. The article touches on this: " 'If anything characterizes the 21st century, it’s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people,' said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University." Basically, cell-phone jamming is the spirit of road rage transferred to a more personal medium. Technology and the values made pervasive by advertising (which address us directly and tell us that we are always the most important person there is) have led us to expect total convenience and complete freedom from the compromises incumbent with getting along with others. So we feel outraged when those absolute, inalienable "rights" to total isolation in a crowd are "violated" by someone else operating by the same principles. What ensues, absent a belief that government can force us to recognize a public sphere where a collective good supersedes any selfish individual preference, is an arms race: on the road, bigger SUVs; on the phone front, cell jammers.

Ads for cell phone use (11 Oct 2007)

Advertisers appear to be salivating at the prospects of sending ads to individuals' cell phones, and they are hoping to bait the hook for consumers by promising that ads will subsidize the cell phones and make them free to use. So having private and personal conversations brought to you by Nike and Starbucks and Miller Lite may not be too far off. As a non-cell-phone user, I can only speculate as to how annoying this will be, though I'd be much more likely to use a cell phone if I didn't have to decode the arcane service plans to get one. I don't need the "convenience" of being always accessible so badly that I'm willing to feel perpetually ripped off by roaming charges and binding contracts and other hidden fees to have it. I've always had difficulty wrapping my mind around the monthly minutes model and the other price discrimination techniques in play with cell phones, and I still can't fathom why text messages are so costly. Maybe when they are supported by ads the way many email services are, that will change.

The advantages to marketers of cell-phone ads are self-evident: The cell phone tracks where you are and allows for the ultimate in contextual ad placement. This is why Google is trying to get in on the action. It also compiles data on what are interested in and what sort of people you talk to, and if they are linked in as well, what they are interested in and so on. The cell phone network that marketers could tap into is much like the social networks mapped out on MySpace and Facebook, only much more useful -- much less fictional, and intimately connected with one's actual conduct in the material world. And because the medium is so personal, the ads can be personalized to the most extreme degree without the danger of alienating those not in the target audience. Presumably, some consumers will find such finely targeted ads useful rather than intrusive. They will want to, for example, know what marketers want them to think of the various retail outlets they might happen to be passing at any given moment.

Tyler Cowen, however, suspects that people probably don't want ads invading the inner sanctum of their phone.

Most people tolerate ads in their TV and radio shows, and indeed most of cable has evolved into an ad-supported medium. [But] many viewers turn on the TV or radio to dull their senses and simply to hear voices or see faces. Those who want more buy HBO and TiVo. In contrast, we call on the cell phone to feel in control of a situation (am I too influenced by my experience of a teenage stepdaughter?). The last thing the caller wants is to have that feeling of control interrupted by...lack of control.

I don't know that people would experience ads directly at them personally as a loss of control, though; they may find it flattering -- "Just imagine, these huge megacorporations have gone to the trouble of getting to know me and my habits personally." A small minority will be utterly creeped out by the thought of all this invasive surveillance, but others will feel the same thrill that reality-TV participants must feel when they know lots of people are watching. Advertising may keep lonely people company, and who is more lonely than the person addicted to checking a cell phone for updates?

Phoning it in (13 Feb 2007)

Several bloggers have recently noted a dread of having to talk on the phone. Matt Yglesias wonders if this is "a common psychological profile to blogging's early adopters" and Amanda Marcotte argues that "the phone simply fails to live up to the internet as a form of remote communication. The advantages of the internet are that you have more control over when you speak to someone. In chat, if they’re online, sweet, you can talk to them. If you’re busy or distracted, log off and no feelings hurt. Email is casual but can be performed on your time. The telephone has none of the convenience or privacy of the internet, but it doesn’t really have the intimacy of in-person conversations."

I also hate the phone; it's ringing jangles my nerves like nothing else, particularly because I've saddled myself with a principled opposition (loosely based on Kant's categorical imperative) to letting it ring through to the answering machine. I can fully relate to Marcotte's point that phone conversations are not sufficiently immersive enough to stop one from, say, playing Freecell at the same time and missing two out of five words the other person says. Maybe being overly habituated to getting information through reading augments that problem; it may take words on a page to get me to really concentrate and focus, and it takes an interlocutor being in the room with me to enforce my attention. Phone conversation also rewards arbitrary space filling; getting a call can sometimes feel like being a television that a bored person's turned on, looking for distraction.

The problem with phone conversations, I think, is that they promise presence but produce absence. Phone talk is pseudo-intimacy that mocks real intimacy. A phone conversation delivers another's unique voice to you, but it's a faint shadow of really hearing them. With other forms of immediate long-distance communication available, what the phone as a medium now communicates (and with such force it tends to drown out whatever is being talked about) is the specificity of the person's voice, and how that voice is not there in the room with you. This prompts me to want to use the phone exclusively for making plans to see people in person in the very near future. Otherwise the fungible written word will have to suffice.

The phone can easily and unfortunately be deployed as a means to control other people.

But perhaps online communication may end up providing us too much control over conversation, making it something that is so completely on-demand that it will eventually become solipsistic. No one will ever be able to force you to discuss something you are not interested in, but perhaps should be -- instead you may be able to use online communication as a screen, tossing off postponing or superficial e-mails that seem to attend to such matters without really bearing down on them. "Real" interpersonal communication may require some actual sacrifice at some point, some reciprocation and compromise (for better or worse, the phone demands these). These are perhaps the building blocks of commitment to a specific audience. But online presence management seems to promise the eradication of these nuisances. You'll be able to have conversation only when it suits you, and you will pop online and be content to talk to whoever happens to be out there. The online population is so vast as to provide any number of people who might relate to you, or at least hold up the mirror in which you want to see yourself. The specificity of the other person may come to be fully irrelevant, leaving you typing for your own sake, for the pleasure it gives you to read your own words regardless of who it is prompting them. Hell, at that point you may as well be blogging.

"Approximeeting" ourselves (5 December 2006)

This week's Economist has a future-technology round-up that suggests we'll soon be piloted around in robotic cars while communicating telepathically with one another via cell phones implanted in our gray matter. I'm probably not alone in finding the prospects of this depressing. Several long articles explore the singular nature of the cell phone as a transformative technology, akin to the automobile in its power to grant us independence from the constraints of time and space while affording us a powerful new medium in which to express the wonder of ourselves. One futurist guru calls is quoted calling it a "remote control for life," which of course made me wonder who in the world would want to operate their life remotely through a tiny little gadget? You've got the whole word to experience, and you're going to filter it through a tinny earpiece and a tiny screen?

Then again, I've long since become a Luddite technophobic crank on the subject of cell phones, stubbornly resistant to having it remake me in its image and bless me with all its splendiferous convenience. If you've read this blog for very long, you already know this, so I apologize for flogging this theme again. Anyway, I was glad to see there's a meme for the annoying tendency of cell-phone users to keep everything contingent and undecided until the last minute -- "approximeeting." The article spun this as an unanticipated but welcome benefit of cell-phone usage, and I'm sure it has useful business applications. In social life, it seems more likely to sow discord and confusion, and encourage people to stop giving anyone the benefit of the doubt when late or incommunicado. I also romanticize the mystery of presence -- that moment when somebody you are supposed to meet actually shows up after you've been wondering where they have been, and then the person is there with you, not merely partially there and partially in a nebulous ether with everyone else who has their number. I like the feeling that actually seeing someone mattters; the always-available, always-filtering nature of cell phone life seems to detract from that; but maybe I'm wrong, maybe it enhances the significance of face time. It may just be that I'm nostalgic for the days, long before I ever existed, when all communication was face to face, "real" and effortful.

Back in the days before computers (and before my having real jobs) I used to write letters to friends, and it seemed as though I knew them better and that I revealed much more of myself, presented a better sense of what I actually think I am like and what has really been preoccupying me. In phone chatter, I talk about what I happened to do that day.

I'm sure my days of holding out from cell phones are numbered. And when my number comes, I'm sure I'll smoothly adapt to the brave new world and wonder why I resisted for so long. But yesterday, as I was studiously avoiding participating in my office Christmas party reading the Economist articles, I couldn't help thinking with an utterly useless and self-defeating vanity, that perhaps I really am somewhat exceptional in not wanting to be accessible for communication, not wanting to be connected. After all there was everybody else in the company happily enjoying being crammed into the lobby with catered food and crappy Christmas music, seemingly enjoying the experience, while the whole idea of venturing out there, even for free sushi, was enough to make me shudder and skulk deeper into my cubicle. I wondered if my revulsion for parties was related to my toxic aversion to cell phones; that the same missing personality trait that makes me unable to cope with parties also makes me unable to cope with the implied constant contact the phone suggests.

But that's probably a little fanciful. The Economist argues that the phone is in fact not about communication as much as it is about self-expression; cell phones are fashion items that are replaced to stay up to date or to express some new subtlety about oneself -- the editorial suggests people will soon own several phones suited for different situations. Maybe that's what I'll do; get one for work and one for nights out, and one for around the house and one for formal occasions and one to make myself feel youthful. It seems to me the only useful purpose for different phones is to maintain different identities -- perhaps this is something we can look forward to. As cell phones govern more of our lives in physical space, it will become easier to become a different person simply by equipping ourselves with a different phone, the same way people can become anyone online. We'll have a different set of data stored, be accessible to a different group of people, be plugged into a different collection of interests -- it's the ultimate form of "approximeeting," in that we would be able to keep our entire personality contingent until the very last minute.