| The digital anteroom AU linguistics professor Naomi Baron examines importance of control in communication technology BY MATT GETTY
Photos by Jeff Watts
Naomi Baron, the author of Alphabet to Email, studies the linguistics of emerging communication technologies. |
If polite young men and women in nineteenth-century America wanted to have a conversation, etiquette dictated that one traveled to the other’s home, presented his or her card, and waited in an anteroom to be formally seen. Then came the telephone. Then e-mail, mobile phones, the World Wide Web. Today, polite young men and women on U.S. college campuses talk to each other on cell phones at the same time they instant message a few other friends, all while browsing through Facebook pages containing personal information about “friends” they’ve never even met. My, how things have changed. Or—from the perspective of linguistics professor Naomi Baron—my, how things haven’t changed at all. After several years of research on how college students communicate through instant messaging, mobile phones, and now Facebook, Baron concludes that today’s technology and yesterday’s etiquette provide essentially the same thing—control. For Baron, understanding this link between anterooms and instant messaging begins with the telephone. When telephones first became widely used, callers could suddenly initiate a conversation at their convenience. People worried that manners would be “tossed out the window,” Baron explains, noting that etiquette guides struggled to cope with the new technology (forbidding phone invitations, for instance, to avoid putting someone on the spot). It wasn’t until the late twentieth century that technology replaced such exhortations with the answering machine, voice mail, and caller ID, which restored the power to choose when and when not to converse.
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Today, even as cell phones make it easier to reach anyone anywhere, Baron has found that we still use technology not necessarily to make ourselves more available, but rather to control when we can be reached. Using a questionnaire she designed last fall with students from her Language in the New Millennium class, Baron discovered that the most important cell phone feature for U.S. college students may be the “off” button. “The answer to the question, ‘What did they like the most about their cell phones,’ was that they like the fact that they can reach people,” she explains. “What did they like least? The fact that people can reach them . . . Many of them said, ‘When I go home for vacation, I shut off my phone. I need a break.’” In working with Rich Ling, a research scientist for a Norwegian telecommunications company and visiting professor at the University of Michigan, Baron also learned that “This notion of controlling conversation . . . is very American.” Americans, it seems, use their cell phones differently from the rest of the world. While Americans routinely screen calls and turn their cell phones off, Baron and Ling’s research showed that Europeans and Japanese answer their calls and text messages immediately. For them the cell phone isn’t an interruption; it’s an extension of themselves. In Finland, for instance, the cell-phone is called a “handi.” “There, it’s your hand,” says Baron. “It’s a part of what you always have available . . . The idea of turning it off to take a break makes no sense. They’d say, ‘Why do you have a cell phone if that’s how you feel?’”
For most students, Facebook pages like the one above are private. “They see the notion of outsiders coming in as particularly rude,” says Baron. “It would be like inviting your faculty to join you at a club on a Saturday night.” |
Yet American college students do feel this way, Baron argues, for the same reason they conduct several IM conversations, talk on the phone, and browse the Web at the same time. A study conducted with PhD candidate Brian Rabinovitz and undergraduate Tim Clem last year revealed that this kind of multitasking lets students “control the volume on social interaction,” a practice Baron sees as unique to this country. “The kinds of control that we feel so good about having in the ways we communicate are not shared by the rest of the world,” says Baron. “Outside of the United States, there’s a much more communitarian sense.” According to her initial findings in a new study on Facebook, even our online communities may not be so communitarian. Working with AU senior Clare Park, Baron has found that the increasingly popular virtual student community may be the latest venue for this struggle between communication and individual control. Facebook—an online forum where high school and college students often depict themselves in ways they may not want prospective employers to view—has made recent news for its potential negative impact on undergraduates’ futures. Yet students, Baron learned from an initial focus group, don’t believe they should censor information they post about themselves. They view Facebook as a private exchange and think they should control access to their pages. Not surprisingly, Baron says, the online service has already begun offering blocking tools and privacy settings to give them that control. Though Baron has yet to complete the study or compare how Americans use Facebook with how Europeans do, she suspects that these tools and settings—like voice mail, caller ID, the cell-phone with its ringer off, the computer layered with multiple windows of IM conversations, and the nineteenth-century anteroom they’ve all replaced—are quintessentially American. “Americans,” says Baron, “in part because of our prosperity, in part because of our political system, and in part because this is the ultimate market economy, have gotten used to having things their way, to being a society of one, to being able to control the way they interact with anyone anywhere.” |
