Page 120 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Mediations: From the Coffee House to the Internet Café 115

it in terms of an unprecedented rise of privatism and withdrawal from
public space: if Raymond Williams saw the emergence of television
engendering a culture that places value on ‘going places’ without
having to physically travel, the mobile phone is in part a reverse
reinforcer of ‘mobile privatisation’ in as much as it keeps us tied to
the private sphere even as we physically traverse public spaces. An
alternative formulation would be that mobile-phone culture signals
just how meaningless the distinction between public and private has
become: putatively private social relations burst forth into public
space whilst the ‘integrity’ of the private realm is shattered by norms
of social intercourse that require us to ‘wear’ mobiles like electronic
tagging devices, keeping us accessible to the outside world 24/7.
But an investigation that engaged the contradictions and tensions
of mobile phone culture would interrogate the meaning of, say, the
ongoing controversies over the ‘etiquette’ of using mobile phones
in public places, and cross-cultural, gendered and inter-generational
54
variations in use and practice, asking how these things speak to the
broader social and cultural context. Rather than making theoretical
pronouncements, theoretically informed research should be asking
more open questions: To what extent is the mobile phone helping
to render the distinction between privacy and publicity culturally
meaningless or phenomenologically hopeless? To what extent does it
elicit defensive reactions that assert the ‘sanctity’ of private or public
space? To what extent does it yield greater interest in or refl exivity
in respect of the intersections of public and private (something
that could possibly be conceived as a productive moment in the
transformation of the public sphere)? The theoretical resources and
research programmes to address these questions are still in their
infancy. Indeed, the cultural consequences, themselves, in all their
complexity, are only beginning to unfold.
George Myerson’s book with the intriguing title Heidegger, Habermas
55
and the Mobile Phone sketches an interesting theoretical framework
that could ignite some productive research, though his strategy

misfires in one sense. Myerson implicates the mobile phone in the
colonisation of the lifeworld thesis, arguing that mobile-phone culture
privileges systemically coordinated communication over reciprocal,
open-ended communication. I agree with Myerson that many of
the dominant tropes of the culture are instrumental (we marvel
at this new tool and wonder how we ever lived without it). Cost
structures, miniaturisation, the elliptical codes of SMS text messaging
and the like all speak to the values of communicative economy: the

23/8/05 09:36:12
Goode 02 chap04 115 23/8/05 09:36:12
Goode 02 chap04 115