It truly is hard to walk down the street for two minutes now and not encounter someone with their head down at their phone, rather than straight ahead and at the world around them.
(Is this symbolic of the future of our society…? Wow… That’s deep, mayne.)
Whether this be in a waiting room, at the airport or even just at the traffic lights, we really have an inclination to ramp up this technological dependence even further when we have to be waiting on something. An excellent term to describe a lot of this behaviour is ‘tele-cocooning’. This basically describes situations where you may be physically present with a lot of people, but not actually socially engaging with any of them. Such as a crowded bus, there may be fifty people, but everyone is engrossed in the activity on their mobile, and not actually taking notice of anything or anyone around them.
On Saitok’s blog, a Japanese journalist, she points out nowadays how hard it is to live without a mobile phone. Even if you have lost or forgotten it for a day, the feelings that arise as a result have been described to being similar of missing a physical part of you.
When discussing the redefining of public space and what is considered socially acceptable, something I have noticed that varies greatly is the public’s response when taking photos. When you are in a typically ‘public’ space such as on the street, there can be varying reactions. If you were approached by someone on the street and were asked if they could take your photo, even if they explained a reason, it wouldn’t be uncommon for you to be hesitant. Conversely, if this was within and event such as a festival, still with twenty thousand people within this community for example, if a photographer came up to you there to take a photo, and I have witnessed the difference, people would are so much more open to have their photo taken. This can seem almost like an honour for some girls and ‘bros’ alike, despite both of these situations having variations of publicness about them. It could be argued that the difference lies in the fact that you are more sure of the purpose behind the photo, but either way you really do not know what the person is going to do with these photos of you. I guess this could also tie in Miep’s analysis in the Daily Kos, where punters could feel more secure having their photo taken as the space is being controlled more.
“The more private the space, the more the rules are made by owners. What is ostensibly owned is usually owned conditionally. To the extent that the owners make the rules, the space is private to the owner.” – Miep, Daily Kros (2011)
Are you more than happy to have your photo taken at festivals?
A combination of both these public and private spaces has emerged in the wake of mobile phones. The simple act of having a portable phone has brought the idea of private conversations to public spaces, and adapting the flow and topic of conversation to the environment you find yourself situated in. I know myself as a very private person, the type of guy who hates discussing life loudly on a train carriage, that I also hate taking phone calls in confined public spaces, such as train carriages! As the notion of what is acceptable has changed over the last few years, sometimes I just have to take the call and discuss my plans in extremely close earshot of one hundred other punters on the train. An alternative to this you would think could be texting, utilising that ‘personal public space’ but as I experimented whilst in a medical centre waiting room (an excellent place for screens in general), I could view and get a decent gist of the material nine out of fourteen phone screens in front of me.
So where can we go from here? Technology is only becoming more and more prevalent in our day to day lives. Where can we increase the privacy? It’s ridiculous to think that everyone is ever going to stop sending texts and taking calls in public spaces, we’re too on the go now as a society to avoid that. I don’t have the answer for this one, but hopefully you do. Leave a comment below or hit me up on Twitter if you think you have found the almighty solution.
ankledeepin 
