From Novelty to Routine
The cell phone worked in new ways to destabilize the boundary between public and private, home and away. As it spread through society, people quickly developed new cultural competencies for handling this border (Caron and Caronia 2007). Here, people speaking on cell phones learned to create walls separating them from the outside world by turning their backs, sinking their voices, speaking while staring into empty space, and avoiding eye contact with others. And while many of these techniques have proven to be effective while using a cell phone on a street corner, they have proven to be of limited use within the confines of a railway car. Here, unwritten rules have slowly begun to take shape, defining how loudly, long and intimately one should speak on the phone. But the routines associated with the cell phone remain something of a contested arena of cultural praxis. The soundscape of the cell phone conversation freely invades the private space of all within earshot. Speakers take hostages, who at times start their own uprisings and protests, or seek refuge in the growing number of cell phone-free railway cars that are appearing on transit lines. At the heart of these tensions lies the simple question of ‘whose space is this, and what rights do I command over in my space’?
‘Overhearing’ my neighbour’s SMS actualized many of these issues and suddenly placed a number of inconspicuous details that I had largely taken for granted in a new light. I tried more than ever to be polite, and not watch her doing her homework. As I did so, however, I found myself accidentally overhearing the other conversations around me. And between us still lay the book bag with which it all began. The bag, as it turns out, was more important in the context of this trip than I had first realized, because in moving the book bag, the woman next to me had opened part of the space on the train that she had reserved for herself. At some level, this was a very small and simple gesture of hospitality – and without reflection we had entered a vaguely defined guest–host relation. After all, she had opened part of the space she had staked out for herself to me, and I had gladly accepted this hospitable gesture – and in so doing proceeded to embark upon the cultural journey that would transform me from a competitor (a person racing to find a seat) to a visitor (claiming my right temporarily to inhabit this space). My discomfort over having ‘overheard’ her SMS (no matter how impersonal it was) was somehow linked to this first gesture – perhaps even by the fact that we had both created small home spaces so close to one another, but that I had then peered over my neighbour’s fence. In so doing, like a guest going through his host’s bedroom drawers, I had transgressed the laws of privacy governing hospitality. As Derrida has pointed out (2000, 2001), hospitality is both fragile and complex:
94
Tom O’Dell