The Atlantic reports on new research exploring how smart phones affect the way people perceive and act in public space. Smart phones, the piece argues, "combine numerous spheres: your social network, your email, your news source, your live personal conversations," and hence are more distracting and appealing than traditional old pre-smart phones (which we all thought were bad enough).
Tali Hatuka, who heads the Laboratory for Contemporary Urban Design at Tel Aviv University... and colleague Eran Toch have been studying smart-phone users relative to their old-school, flip-phone counterparts. And the difference between the two groups is surprisingly stark, with serious implications for the future of public space in cities and the often-uncelebrated role that sociologists say they play.
“It’s very interesting to see that some of the basic ideas of public spaces are conceived totally differently by smart-phone users,” Hatuka says.
The ubiquitous smart phone may even degrade the way we recognize, memorize and move through cities.
She and Toch have given lengthy surveys to both smart-phone and traditional cell-phone users, quizzing them about their own behavior – where, when and how they use phones – and how they feel about the behavior of others. Smart-phone users, for starters, are much more commonly under the illusion that they have privacy even when walking down a public sidewalk. They’re less skittish about having personal conversations in public. They’re more detached from their physical surroundings. They’re more likely to violate social norms about having disruptive, private phone conversations (and less likely to feel guilty about this)....
In their surveys, Hatuka and Toch also asked what sounded like some pretty silly questions about what people remembered of the public spaces they’d visited just 10 minutes earlier: what did those places and the people there look like? Smart-phone users couldn’t remember much at all, which is another of way saying that they weren’t paying attention in the first place. This suggests, Hatuka says, that the ubiquitous smart phone may even degrade the way we recognize, memorize and move through cities.
But paradoxically, if they effectively distract us from out surroundings, they also can provide us with enough information about our locations to make it unnecessary for us to deal with our fellow citizens:
Five years ago, if you didn’t know how to get somewhere in the city, you’d probably stop to ask a stranger. Now, Google Maps can get you there. “So no one is asking anything,” Hatuka says. “This kind of stranger communication is a vital thing for a society. The communication of strangers was always one of the key roles of public spaces, observing and exchanging with the other. Because smart phones are supplying so many of these services, this kind of exchange with the stranger is just diminished to almost zero.”
So the result is a greater ability to complete a task (i.e., get from point A to point B in an unfamiliar space in a short amount of time) but a degraded capacity to remember anything about that space, or to make the kinds of unexpected discoveries that travelers usually cherish.