Unshaken Hands

OBSERVER

Unshaken Hands on the Digital Street

By MICHAEL BUGEJA

Recently I visited Harvard University and got lost at a busy crossroad near Harvard Yard, one of academe's most famous greens. It was 9 a.m., and the street was packed with book-toting students, casually dressed academics, and administrative types in business suits. I was wearing such a suit with a red lapel pin reading "Iowa State University," clearly labeling me a stranger.

I direct the journalism school at ISU and also serve on the board of the university's Institute of Science and Society. This day in Cambridge I was looking for the Nieman Foundation, where an important accreditation meeting was in progress. Needing directions, I stopped at the crosswalk. Strangers paraded by, some wearing headphones, some chatting into cellphones, and one tinkering with a hand-held computer, otherwise known as a PDA (personal digital assistant).

Perhaps it was the pressure of being lost and late with a reaccreditation decision pending for my journalism school, but I experienced a distinct loneliness amid the digitally accessorized morning crowd.

Finally I spotted a man in a T-shirt and jeans without headphone, hand-held, or cell. I approached and asked, "Can you tell me where Francis Avenue is?"

"I am new here," he said in a European accent. "Tourist."

I had to get to that meeting. I decided to interrupt the next person who came by, even if he or she were using a cellphone.

This is the new faux pas on the digital street. Only a year or so ago, if interrupted, the cellphone user would apologize to the stranger -- well, at least they would in Iowa. There was still a rudimentary respect for community, that association with public physical place. The most public place is the street, says the author-activist Parker J. Palmer, for there, even when nobody speaks, people send nonverbal messages to strangers affirming that "we occupy the same territory, belong to the same human community." Even though recreation centers have replaced many parks, developments have homogenized housing, and megamalls have dislodged Main Streets, we have, for the most part, remained engaged in our public face-to-face encounters with others.

But that is no longer always the case. When we perceive the street to be unsafe, Palmer warned 23 years ago in The Company of Strangers, we withdraw from it, and it becomes unsafe. These days the digital street seems safe enough most of the time. It's the solitude of that street, even in a crowd, that has become unsafe psychologically. Or that was my thought, anyway, at the crossroad as a young woman approached, wearing headphones.

Ever try to attract the attention of a person wearing headphones who is striding in your direction? You walk backward, keep pace, and gesticulate. The woman stopped. Her first impulse was to glance around to get her bearing, withdrawing from the MP3 world into the real one. Then she lifted the headphones and noticed my Iowa State pin, sensing my situation. I apologized for interrupting her and explained that I was lost. She directed me to Francis Avenue in time for the reaccreditation decision (which, happily, went in our favor).

As I walked back to my hotel near Harvard Yard, I used my cellphone to deliver the good news to my colleagues, keeping pace with the noonday crowd on the digital street. Chatting into my hand, I fit right in.

The cellphone has changed society more than the home computer, which it has assimilated. Cellphones sound during worship, wakes, births, graduations, hearings, trials, and accreditation meetings -- interrupting life-changing spiritual or secular proceedings, with most people present showing only mild annoyance, if any. Cellphones remind us that we dwell in more than one place at most times, splitting consciousness in parks, cars, schools, restaurants, and malls. We are connected to everyone elsewhere and not necessarily to anyone in our immediate environs. Our surroundings metamorphose into elevator music -- they are our space but not our place.

We pay a price for that, not only in access fees but in feelings. The medium is not just the message any longer, but the moral too, and virtual morality is born out of mechanism rather than humanism. When parents on cellphones push toddlers in strollers, their children are introduced to the community without a focused tour guide. By the time they attend college, they will come to view technology as companionship. The Internet may promise companionship, too, but people who use cellphones in a public place generally ignore others, as if they weren't there. That indicates one's priorities and hence social values.

College students view technology as portable entertainment. In fact, many do not distinguish between entertainment and communication -- they are one and the same. Why not? Students have been reared with speaking toys, interactive keyboards, cable TV, arcade consoles, Internet play, game handsets, cellphones, MP3 players, chat rooms, moo's (multi-user domain -- object oriented), and blogs.

Nowhere is the street more digital than during so-called "celebratory riots." These disturbances revolve around entertainment -- alcohol and partying -- rather than around the social issues of "smart mobs," the term Howard Rheingold has given to groups like the 1999 protesters at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, who used "'swarming' tactics," replete with mobile phones, Web sites, laptops and hand-held computers, to drive home their demonstration. Those participating in certain celebratory riots might, in comparison, be labeled "dumb mobs."

At Ohio University, for instance, where I taught for several years, riots typically occurred at the time change marking daylight saving time, when campus-area bars closed early, spilling partiers into the street, where they protested the loss of an hour's alcohol consumption on a weekend -- a far cry from the social causes of smart mobs. Dumb mobs also are equipped with cellphones to summon students to the riot scene so that they, too, can observe the reality show of police clashes, overturned cars, and burning dumpsters.

At Ohio I also worked as a special assistant to then-President Robert Glidden. We created a character-education program called "Your Path at Ohio" to instill in students a sense of pride in campus and community, and it did that for a few years, until cellphones captured the street.

Glidden has noted that cellphone technology can increase the numbers at any party quickly, and also play a role in increasing numbers at riots.

That phenomenon was apparent in a 2004 riot at Iowa State University during Veishea (an acronym combining the first letters of the university's colleges). Veishea is a wonderful town-gown event, introducing many students to their Ames community through parades of floats and glimpses of historic Americana. But it's also an occasion to party, and a few off-campus parties this year got out of hand in the early-morning hours following the Veishea celebration. Police arriving at the scene were momentarily stunned by what appeared to be, as the Ames Tribune described it, "a sea of fireflies" that was actually "rioters calling their friends on cellphones to draw more people into the mob."

In the aftermath of the riot, the administration suspended Veishea for a year while a task force grapples with how to minimize the recurrence of such disturbances. Because of my work at Ohio, I was appointed to the executive committee. I am not sure what we will recommend, but I am sure that the digital street will be a factor in our deliberations.

Shortly after the task force was assembled, I felt it would be helpful to introduce our chairwoman, Catherine Woteki, dean of the College of Agriculture, to student editors at the Iowa State Daily, housed in the journalism school.

The meeting went well enough. The dean learned about student attitudes, and the editors learned more about task-force goals. We spoke at length about the role of cellphones in the riot. When our session ended, the dean extended her hand to one of the editors at the precise moment his cellphone rang.

Naturally he took the call, oblivious of the dean's extended hand.

She looked perplexed, as I must have that day at Harvard Yard. She kept her hand out no more than 10 seconds or so -- interminably long, given the circumstances. But the symbolism of that unshaken hand has remained etched in my mind.

Michael Bugeja is director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University. His new book, Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age, is scheduled to be published by Oxford University Press in September.

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Volume 50, Issue 47, Page B5