Privatizing  the  City  Street: From  the  Walkman  to  the  iPhone?

Some weeks ago I was interviewed by the BBC who wanted to know my views on whether technologies like the Apple iPod were making us more anti-social. They asked me this as I had written a book on how over one thousand iPod users worldwide used these tiny devices in the city. Whether we use iPods or smart-phones with MP3 capacity – the majority of us can now move through the city enclosed in our very own sound bubble. The story produced a flood of reader responses who either blamed the technology for helping to make our cities unfriendly places in which it becomes difficult to even ask directions from somebody listening to their iPod to those who argued that listening to their iPod was the most pleasurable activity of their day – and besides - who speaks to anybody in public nowadays anyhow?

I’d like to suggest that both these responses are largely correct and that they are very important questions for us to think about. The history of cities is in some sense a history of how we come to share public space - and the technologies that we use transform these spaces. We use iPhones and iPods to create pleasurable bubbles of sound through which the city is experienced. In doing so the city becomes a private space - this is not new - automobiles set the trend going - separating us out from the world beyond the car, the Walkman followed this in the 1970s to be followed by that technology we all have, the mobile phone - how can people talk about their intimate lives in front of us in the street or on the train? Simple - we don’t exist for them. This is not to say that we are anti-social - we still crave company - but not the company of strangers – our sense of the social has increasingly migrated to a mediated sociality of absent friends and family – whilst the streets we move through are experienced as lonely and socially ‘chilly’. We heat these spaces up – but privately – when we use technologies like the iPod or our mobile phones. What I refer to as ‘warmth’ in an ocean of ‘chill’. John is typical of this trend, “I use my iPod as a ‘privacy bubble’ against other people. It allows me to stay in my own head.”

Yet the iPod also has a magical quality for users - it contains all their music – it’s part of them and they often use it habitually. Peter, for example, says ‘It has dramatically changed the way I listen to music. I use my iPod every day, generally for four to six hours a day. I listen to it at work, at home, in the car, on the tube,” Using a technology like an iPod permits users to control their environment, their mood and other people. They are in control of their world – precisely by excluding the world beyond them or transforming it into their own private movie - the world becomes what they want it to be. In a world where we spend more of our time on our own and on the move - technologies like the Apple iPod enable us to take back some of our time -precisely by locking us away in our own separate world.

Critics of David Cameron, the British Prime Minister’s idea of the ‘big society’ often say it is too abstract. Maybe this is because our sense of the social has become abstract – increasingly taken away from the spaces that we more often than not live in - our sense of community is increasingly locked into the abstractness of the web with its social networks or in our mobile phones and iPods. In today’s technologically mediated world is the desire for a shared social space merely nostalgic. If so, spare a thought for Alison who had been a regular Walkman user in the 1990s. “In retrospect I wish I had not been stuck in my own head, so disconnected. People feel so alien to me know. They stand in line in front of me, dancing ever so slightly to their tune, often oblivious to what’s happening around them and completely closed off from the niceties of the neighborly ‘hello’.