Public space

You know how these things go: you innocently post a response to a friend's post and use a phrase, you sorta think about it, and before you know it, the subject seems everywhere. Such is the case with the phrase that is the title of this topic.
This all came to a head yesterday. In the morning, Mrs. Meridian and I listened to an interview with Christine Rosen on her new article in The New Atlantis on TiVos and iPods, which I've linked to and will discuss more fully below. Then later, Mrs. Meridian and I were visiting her parents for Sunday supper, and Mrs. Meridian was recounting an experience that few have NOT had. While at the video-rental store, she overheard a girl on her cellphone talking quite loudly to someone: "He said THAT about me?? . . . I can't believe that . . . Well, I'm just going to call him right now," etc. She did, confronting "him": "Is it true what you said about me?" And so on. My mother-in-law said, "I would have gone up to her and asked, 'Well, what DID he say?'" to which I replied, "She probably would have told you to mind your own business."
I've by no means done any truly deep thinking on the subject of public space (for THAT work, see the articles by Christine Rosen (and the people SHE refers to) that I've linked to here). But it's clear that public space is tricky to negotiate precisely because it is public--everyone has some right to it. What happens with cellphone users, as Rosen points out in another (excellent) article in The New Atlantis, "Our Cell Phones, Ourselves", is that their phone isolates them from that space, removing their attention from the presence and sensibilities of others. The user's needs become paramount, and if those others draw the user's attention to his/her intrusion into their space, THEY are, as often as not, seen as intruding into his/her space. The cellphone allows the concretion of the ego in the user, creating at best a lapse in consideration, at worst out and out violence.
And that's the first point I wish to raise about public space: that recognizing that everyone has a right to it should mean that we all should pay a modicum of attention to who else is occupying it. This means more than just being polite; it should also, I think, mean actively listening to and perhaps even engaging in conversations with others about how they are using that space. I should say that as I write this I have something in mind like the central plaza of a European or Latin American city, but not only in the literally physical sense of a plaza. As visitors to those places who have lingered in a plaza know, more happens than the mere movement of people through it: they meet, they have coffee, they read, they look at people selling art or books or handicrafts, they listen to evangelizers of every brand of religion and politics . . . hmm--sounds a little like the blogosphere, in its better moments, to me. But like any technology, as Thoreau saw happening with railroads, linkage at one level can cause disconnetions at other levels that are, perhaps, more valuable than the ones gained.
This brings me to the second Rosen article, "The Age of Egocasting". Her thesis is a compelling one: that TiVo and iPods indeed give their owners more control over what they watch and listen to than they have ever had before--control, in fact, is at the center of their power to seduce their users. But in the case of TiVo, she argues, people who have it actually end up watching MORE television than they had before. It does not save us TV-watching time; instead, it carves out more time for watching TV that had been dedicated to other pursuits. As for iPods, she contends that sampling has the end effect of isolating us from learning about and being challenged by other music and, more broadly, other art--with so many hundreds of hours on those little chips, why listen to anything else . . . especially something you might not like?
Culture--human interaction, in other words--suffers in a world whose machines permit the individual to plug him/herself in and be immersed in sound and image solely of his/her own selection. It's rather like listening to an "Oldies" station or a "Classic Rock" station: the songs on the playlists, removed from their contexts, become, for me, harder to listen to, less pleasing to listen to, if you pretty much know that the station WILL play "Mony, Mony" that day. So too with such technologies. If you're the one programming your iPod, where will surprise occur? When will you hear or see something you hadn't heard or seen before?
Technology is the elimination of surprise. But it can also be a tool to facilitate it. And that occurs, I think, so long as we don't lose our sense of the importance of public space.

Technorati tag:
Public space