I&#39;m not there

Florencia Enghel

I'm not there

2013, Balder

In December 2013, the Swedish culture magazine "Balder" invited me to write a short piece reflecting on the quality of communication among strangers in the public realm at a time of smart phones. The magazine's editor and I had discussed this matter informally more than once, referring to Stockholm. This is not an academic article -it is a brief reflection on questions that occupy me at present, albeit from a different angle, in my doctoral research. "Balder" published it in Swedish, in a generous translation by Swedish writer Anna-Karin Palm. What I am posting here is the original text in English.

Originally published in Swedish as “Jag är inte där” (translated by Anna-Karin Palm) in Balder magazine 4/13, in December 2013. See http://www.baldersforlag.se/om-balder/ I am not there by Flor Enghel Samhörighet är kanske något man måste hitta inom sig själv. Anna Höglund, ”Om detta talar man endast med kaniner” I am back in Stockholm, once again riding the metro. I remain the owner of a mobile phone that is not smart –all I can do with it is make and receive phone calls, and send and receive text messages. When asked why I don’t have a smartphone yet, I explain that it leaves me free to watch everyone else in the city that has one while they do their own wired thing in public places. This alibi seems to work for now. My reply tends to be met with slightly disconcerted looks, as if there was something mildly wrong with me, but so far no one has scolded me for refraining from joining the trend. I do wonder, however, how much longer I’ll manage to resist the pressure. According to a recent review from Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, I am living in the European country with the smallest proportion of people who never use the Internet: Swedes connect to the Internet through their mobile devices more than any other Europeans, with about 70 percent of them surfing the web when they are outside their homes and away from their desks. Erich Fromm’s dilemma from 1976, put forward in his book “To have or to be?”, is largely out of the question here. For most Swedes, there seems to be no being without having a smartphone, and without spending a significant amount of time –and of their being in public places- online. At this point, I should emphasize that I am not raising the matter to pass moral judgment. When I say that I am too interested in observing digital city dwellers to bother with becoming one myself, it is actually true. I am not thinking that smartphone users are wrong. I feel curious about what else is happening to them, to all of us, as they get more and more engrossed in mobile online activity while in public space. As of late, I’ve been increasingly intrigued by what the possession and mastery of a smart phone may do to our ability to acknowledge the presence of strangers in shared places. Awareness. Boundaries. Walls. Bridges. Proximity and distance. Communication. Riding the metro, we are in a common space, but it looks to me like most people are predominantly elsewhere, courtesy of their smartphones. Chatting intimately with a distant friend or a lover. Working after hours. Browsing the statuses of electronic friends on Facebook. Doing business. Listening to music or a radio broadcast or podcast. Trading. Watching TV programs, movies or videos. Compressing ideas into “tweets”. Taking photos and sharing them on Instagram. And so on. [Some of them are of course still using their phones for calls, in which case personal detail or office stuff might be publicly aired, for anyone to hear.] Originally published in Swedish as “Jag är inte där” (translated by Anna-Karin Palm) in Balder magazine 4/13, in December 2013. See http://www.baldersforlag.se/om-balder/ With a smartphone, hearing is through headphones, and headphones are a bit like earplugs: one hears what comes from the gadget, and is shielded against the surrounding sounds -the voices of others, the request of a beggar, the selling pitch of a “Situation Stockholm seller”, the screeching of the railway, the wind blowing or rain falling in this or that station… Eyesight is with the screen, looking into an enthralling single spot –an onwards, sometimes downwards, narrow field of vision. Depth perception, the ability to perceive the relative distance (or proximity) of objects in one’s visual field, is most likely on hold. Hands and fingers are with the gadget –a predictable, obedient, smooth-surfaced dashboard. Riding the metro, our bodies are there, but smartphone operators have a number of their senses engaged somewhere else. In this variety of split attention, the immediate physical environment is superseded by the digitally mediated yonder. Our bodies are riding the metro, but the spaces we inhabit are multiple and dispersed. [Of course, smartphones might enable the interiority long linked to reading or listening to music. But it is their externality- and multiplicity-prone design that I am pondering here.] In Stockholm, negotiating our way through public space when surrounded by people we do not know seems to have become more and more a matter of holding on to our portable devices and engaging with activity at a distance. [This is not the case in other cities where I’ve been lately, such as Belgrade or Sarajevo, and when I got there I was taken by surprise by how striking the difference felt, although I already knew about it in theory.] The shift makes me wonder. We’ve gone from being people on the streets to being constant bearers of single multipurpose instruments. What is the impact of this super-mediated scenario on our ability to relate to strangers? What happens to our capacity to feel for those others with whom we are not familiar? Could we be losing out on opportunities for unexpected, unmediated interactions? What would be a way out of the retreat into movable private activity that smartphones seem to embody? Is far reaching media somehow preventing us from communicating with those nearby? Are we present to one another, when we intersect in public space? Driven by curiosity, I stare at metro travelers who are busy with their devices. I keep hoping that my scrutiny will provoke a reaction. [Hello… Can you sense that I am trying to call your attention? Are you aware of my strong wish to ask you a question? When was the last time you were friendly to a stranger in your immediate vicinity?] But most often than not, I am met with disattention. As it turns out, for as long as fellow metro travelers do not give their gadgets a break and look around… I am not there.

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