One can
talk about common manners!: The use of mobile
telephones in inappropriate situations
Evil communications corrupt good manners-I
Corinthians 15:33
A man by nothing is so well bewrayed, as by
his manners-Edmund Spenser
PB 83
2007 Kjeller
Norway
Abstract
The use of mobile telephones in various situations has become an element
in the definition of socially appropriate/inappropriate behavior.They
are causing us to reconsider how we construct our social worlds.Their
use demands a reevaluation of the taken-for-granted assumptions of everyday
life. This paper examines how people deal with inappropriate mobile telephones
use, particularly in restaurants. The data, that is the talk, was collected in
focus groups and through participation in electronic discussions on Usenet. The
participants from the focus groups included 50 persons, 34 men and 16 women. Of
the respondents, 30 reported experience with a mobile
telephone while the remaining 20 reported only limited experience.The
paper has also drawn on Goffman’s notion of drama and
staging. From this basis it examines the reasons
that restaurants are particularly sensitive to the use of mobile telephones.There is a discussion of, among other things,
parallel front stages and coerced eavesdropping.Finally,
there is a discussion of the management strategies available when “threatening”
situations arise.
1 Introduction
Not long ago I attended a church service in my wife’s
hometown, a small village on the West Coast of Norway.The church is a beautiful old stone building that
was built around the year 1000.The inside of the building has white walls have
the remains of drawings from the first part of the millennium. In addition
there are beautiful pews and an altar that reflect a long tradition of
intricate woodworking.I was sitting near the back of
the church not really listening to the singsong of the preaching, only enjoying
the sunshine through the windows.I was trying to take
in the scene when suddenly, on the other side of the aisle I heard the telltale
peeping of a mobile phone. The offender sprang out of the pew in which he was
sitting and rushed out of the church.After exchanging
glances with several others sitting near me, things settled down again and I
retreated back into my inner thoughts.
By now, most of us have been in a bus, an elevator or a restaurant and
have heard or seen somebody talking on a mobile telephone.In
addition to the locations mentioned above, I have seen, or experienced, people
using mobile telephones in places ranging from art galleries to toilet stalls.
In a 1937 Readers Digest article Smith noted that, “There is no room
in the house so private that he (sic.) cannot crash it
by telephone” (Smith cited in Fischer 1992, 225).This lament now seems to
have been extended to the far corners of the known world. These sightings show
just how widespread the technology has become while the awkwardness of these
situations points to the ways in which we are having
to reexamine, or perhaps re-exert our ideas of propriety.
In this paper I am interested in examining how it is that people are
making sense of these changes and where people place the boundary between the
appropriate and the inappropriate use of mobile telephones.I
focus particular attention on the use of mobile phones in restaurants since it
seems to have become a metaphor for vulgarity.The
development of this metaphor is, however, not that surprising from a
sociological perspective.After all, it is in
restaurants that one sees quite clearly people dealing with the issues of
self-presentation, boundary issues, etiquette, and “stage management.”
This paper is a continuation of my work on the social boundary issues
associated with the introduction of video telephony (Ling 1996).The mobile
telephone, on many respects, represents the opposite of video telephones.Where videophones require one to be fixed to a
specific location, one can roam with a mobile phone.Where
one is forced to pay attention to their conversation partner with a video
telephone, one is freer to carry out parallel activities with a mobile telephone.Where the video telephone conversation is a
well-bounded event, the mobile telephone call is less well defined and can
intrude while one is on the bus, in a restaurant. . .or in church.
The work analyses data from a series of focus groups held in the