Electronic nomads

The Economist has a special report out on nomadism, that is the current move towards virtual interaction and liberating oneself from being specifically located. Its a report that is full of interesting observations and ideas, and though what I’ve pulled out below might seem about threats to society, the report as a whole is rather evenhanded (as The Economist is to a fault) and makes sure to state that all technologies during their ingestion periods are regarded with suspicion.

From the Economist.com: Special report on Nomadism: Family Ties

But such communications go far beyond the merely utilitarian. Manuel Castells, the sociologist at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, says that mobile technology affects children the most. On one hand, adolescents today become socially autonomous earlier than their parents did, “building their own communities from the bottom up” through constant text-messaging and photo-sharing among their clique, even if this circumvents the wishes of their parents. On the other hand, they also have their parents on speed-dial, and are only one button away from help if they get into trouble. Mr Castells calls this a “safe autonomy pattern”.

This has some sociologists concerned. James Katz at Rutgers calls the mobile phone a new sort of umbilical cord between children and their parents and wonders whether this might in some cases “retard maturation”. Sherry Turkle, the psychologist at MIT, says that wireless gadgets are, ironically, a “tethering technology” and create new dependencies that delay the important “Huck Finn moment” in young lives when adolescents first realise that they are alone on the urban equivalent of the Mississippi. Getting drunk and lost after a party is different when one push of a button summons the parental chauffeur. In 2005 a psychology professor at Middlebury College in Vermont found that undergraduates were communicating with their parents, on average, more than ten times a week.

The potential problem with connected presence is that it usually excludes other people who may be physically present. In situations that might once have been an opportunity to talk to a stranger—waiting for a bus or boarding an aeroplane, say—people now fill the time with a few messages to parents, lovers or friends. This strengthens the strong ties, but weakens, or even cuts, the weak ties in society. In some cases, says Mr Ling, it leads to “bounded solidarity”, when cliques become so turned in on themselves that they all but stop interacting with the wider society around them.

The weak ties referred to came to prominence a few years ago when a study found that wellbeing was somewhat dependent on weak ties, that is, ties with acquaintances, those friendly daily presences such as the person you get coffee from, people with whom you interact on a superficial but warm level. It was felt that these could be as or even more important than the strong ties in life.

I think I agree that this erosion is a bad one. When you move somewhere the first thing you do is build up these weak ties. They are relatively easy and they form the basis for stronger ties. They are usually calm and without the potential stress of familial relationships and may in fact be an oasis from those, a way of having company without really having it.

But all in all, the danger is simply that groups cohere weakly and spontaneously wherever people gather. And it is through these chance encounters and unusual formations that one learns empathy. Many contemporary forces fragment the social order, both isolating and strengthening the class experience to the detriment of communitarian action.

Probably the single most common etiquette conflict occurs, as Mr Ling puts it, when mediated communication interrupts co-present communication, as when two or more people are sitting at a table in conversation or negotiation and one of them gets, and answers, a call. The other co-present people must now keep themselves busy while seeming nonchalant. What is more, they must pretend not to be eavesdropping even though they are only a few feet away from the mediated conversation, ideally by assuming a pose of concentration on some other object, such as their fingernails or their own phone. As soon as the intervening call ends, everybody must try to re-enter the co-present context as gracefully as possible.

We’ve all had this experience. Not long ago I was in an airport awaiting a flight and listening without wanting to, to a man discussing his father’s hospital stay over the phone to someone. I’m sure that even though he had made all the rather intimate details public, he would have felt insulted and intruded upon, had I given an opinion to his discourse.

I have three thoughts about this. The first is I wonder if this is paralleled in any way by earlier days where servants were expected “not to hear” their betters. And second, I feel insulted by this, because it implies that I am not there. Third, I’ve found that when people keep their mouths shut or say little they seem more intelligent, and very few cell phone conversations I have overheard have changed the truth of that statement. In most cases, someone who I thought was a reasonable human being showed themselves to be overly pompous (these are the ones who need to let the public know that they are busy and important people) or consumed by the need to yack if there was ever more than a minute or two to wait.

From the Economist.com: Special report on Nomadism: Homo mobilis

This criticism dovetails strikingly with what other sociologists and psychologists are observing in the interpersonal behaviour of some nomads. Older people use their mobile phones to “micro-co-ordinate” with partners during the day in order to run their errands more efficiently and perhaps to spend more time together as a result. But many younger people, who have never known paper diaries or an unconnected world, micro-co-ordinate in order to avoid committing themselves to any fixed meeting time, location or person at all. After all, a better opportunity might yet present itself.

My brother told me that when he was in South Korea (well known for cell phone mania) he drove his colleagues insane by not having a cell phone. He said it annoyed them because then they could not call him at the last minute to manipulate the agreed upon meeting time. Having a cell phone meant never having to be on time, or never to show up for certain.