John Strausbaugh, New York, April 12, 2009The Sociopathy of Bubble Boy
He's a cliché of the contemporary urban environment. The guy barreling down the sidewalk with his earbuds plugged into his skull, his head down, his eyes glued to the iPhone or Crackberry or other handheld Whosit, his thumbs flying as he texts or twitters or games. He's so engrossed in his private, mobile bubble of me.com that he walks straight into a lamppost, or traffic, or you or me.
He runs into you or me because we have failed to clear a path for him. Whatever he's twittering about was too vital and absorbing for him to pay attention to us. It was up to us to avoid him. He quite literally does not see or hear us. In effect, he has erased us from existence.
This goes, I think, beyond a lapse of civility. Bubble Boy is a kind of virtual sociopath, committing virtual mass murder by the simple act of being too immersed in me.com to grant anyone else the right to exist and walk down the street.
It's easy to blame Bubble Boy's behavior on his iPod or Bluetooth or Crackberry. But the relationship of Man and his gadgets is more complicated than that. It's an enabling and co-dependent thing.
Academics have spent a lot of time and grant money studying how new technologies effect the humans who use them, and vice versa. When a new technology is something grand, like the steam locomotive or electrical power or the hydrogen bomb, you don't need a Ph.D. to see its effects on civilization. But at the level of appliances, gadgets and gizmos, the interactions can be more subtle and gradual, though no less profound.
The iPhone and Bluetooth and all that are pretty good examples, I think, of how Man and his gadgets evolve in symbiotic relationships. When the telephone was first marketed in the 1880s, it was conceived, both by pioneering telephone companies and users, as a messaging device, very like the telegraph from which it developed. Early telephones were installed in places of work, and businesspeople used them to shout at each other the same kinds of business information they'd previously communicated by telegram or post. This is nicely and accurately illustrated in the film Topsy-Turvy as the characters scream box office figures at each other through their primitive telephones.
Apparently, when phones first spread to households, people used them the same way. You called the butcher, the train station, the fire department or police. You did not call your neighbor and gab inanities for an hour. Partly there were mechanical reasons for this: long blabbing conversations would tie up party lines and clog early exchanges, and besides you'd shout yourself hoarse. But evidently most users also felt an innate inhibition against hollering personal conversations into the ether, a sense of propriety or just shyness. There were two spheres, one personal and the other public, and people in those days had a deep, mortal dread of letting the private one spill over into the public.
It wasn't until the 1920s, when a whole new generation of users came along, and the old boundaries between private and public behavior were eroding (for various reasons, some having to do with the psychic and social aftershocks of the Great War), and telephone companies were now pushing users to reach out and touch someone, that most folks developed the habit of blabbing trivia endlessly on their phones.
Now, this is where I think the symbiosis kicks in. As people came to use the telephone more and more for useless, meaningless, one-sided blabbering and less and less for actual two-way communication, they developed an urge, a need, to be doing that all the time. The development of mobile telephone technology answered this need, leading to the present hell of doofi shouting into cell-phones and headsets everywhere you go, and narcissistic, infantile sociopaths cocooned in their bubbles expecting everyone else to clear a path for them, both physically and psychically, on crowded sidewalks, on trains and planes, and in public spaces generally. The whole concept of a boundary between private and public space has vanished. Anywhere Bubble Boy trundles his bubble now becomes his space, a satellite of me.com.
Every generation in recorded history, and no doubt uncounted more before that, has fretted about the imminent death of civility. It's clear that throughout the modern era, the first thing we've done with a new household gadget or personal gizmo is figure out how to use it to annoy our neighbors. Thus the radio, the phonograph, the car, the car alarm, the car stereo, the gas-powered lawnmower and leafblower, the cell-phone and iPhone and Bluetooth and Crackberry.
If the gas-powered leafblower was never invented, your neighbor couldn't use his to wake you up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning. But he'd figure out some other way, because he's a sociopath. What the leafblower does, like all appliances, is to make his sociopathic urges quick 'n' easy to act out. The same goes for guns. Guns don't kill people, people do. But guns sure do make it quick 'n' easy. The handgun is a killing appliance. The semi-automatic handgun is the Veg-o-Matic of murder and mayhem. And the iPhone and Crackberry are Bubble Boy's Heckler & Koch.
He runs into you or me because we have failed to clear a path for him. Whatever he's twittering about was too vital and absorbing for him to pay attention to us. It was up to us to avoid him. He quite literally does not see or hear us. In effect, he has erased us from existence.
This goes, I think, beyond a lapse of civility. Bubble Boy is a kind of virtual sociopath, committing virtual mass murder by the simple act of being too immersed in me.com to grant anyone else the right to exist and walk down the street.
It's easy to blame Bubble Boy's behavior on his iPod or Bluetooth or Crackberry. But the relationship of Man and his gadgets is more complicated than that. It's an enabling and co-dependent thing.
Academics have spent a lot of time and grant money studying how new technologies effect the humans who use them, and vice versa. When a new technology is something grand, like the steam locomotive or electrical power or the hydrogen bomb, you don't need a Ph.D. to see its effects on civilization. But at the level of appliances, gadgets and gizmos, the interactions can be more subtle and gradual, though no less profound.
The iPhone and Bluetooth and all that are pretty good examples, I think, of how Man and his gadgets evolve in symbiotic relationships. When the telephone was first marketed in the 1880s, it was conceived, both by pioneering telephone companies and users, as a messaging device, very like the telegraph from which it developed. Early telephones were installed in places of work, and businesspeople used them to shout at each other the same kinds of business information they'd previously communicated by telegram or post. This is nicely and accurately illustrated in the film Topsy-Turvy as the characters scream box office figures at each other through their primitive telephones.
Apparently, when phones first spread to households, people used them the same way. You called the butcher, the train station, the fire department or police. You did not call your neighbor and gab inanities for an hour. Partly there were mechanical reasons for this: long blabbing conversations would tie up party lines and clog early exchanges, and besides you'd shout yourself hoarse. But evidently most users also felt an innate inhibition against hollering personal conversations into the ether, a sense of propriety or just shyness. There were two spheres, one personal and the other public, and people in those days had a deep, mortal dread of letting the private one spill over into the public.
It wasn't until the 1920s, when a whole new generation of users came along, and the old boundaries between private and public behavior were eroding (for various reasons, some having to do with the psychic and social aftershocks of the Great War), and telephone companies were now pushing users to reach out and touch someone, that most folks developed the habit of blabbing trivia endlessly on their phones.
Now, this is where I think the symbiosis kicks in. As people came to use the telephone more and more for useless, meaningless, one-sided blabbering and less and less for actual two-way communication, they developed an urge, a need, to be doing that all the time. The development of mobile telephone technology answered this need, leading to the present hell of doofi shouting into cell-phones and headsets everywhere you go, and narcissistic, infantile sociopaths cocooned in their bubbles expecting everyone else to clear a path for them, both physically and psychically, on crowded sidewalks, on trains and planes, and in public spaces generally. The whole concept of a boundary between private and public space has vanished. Anywhere Bubble Boy trundles his bubble now becomes his space, a satellite of me.com.
Every generation in recorded history, and no doubt uncounted more before that, has fretted about the imminent death of civility. It's clear that throughout the modern era, the first thing we've done with a new household gadget or personal gizmo is figure out how to use it to annoy our neighbors. Thus the radio, the phonograph, the car, the car alarm, the car stereo, the gas-powered lawnmower and leafblower, the cell-phone and iPhone and Bluetooth and Crackberry.
If the gas-powered leafblower was never invented, your neighbor couldn't use his to wake you up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning. But he'd figure out some other way, because he's a sociopath. What the leafblower does, like all appliances, is to make his sociopathic urges quick 'n' easy to act out. The same goes for guns. Guns don't kill people, people do. But guns sure do make it quick 'n' easy. The handgun is a killing appliance. The semi-automatic handgun is the Veg-o-Matic of murder and mayhem. And the iPhone and Crackberry are Bubble Boy's Heckler & Koch.
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Comments (1)
The infantalization of sociopathology
Long before Bubble Boy, even before people started talking aloud in movie theaters, I worked for a tobacco lobbyist who occasionally asserted his dominance in meetings by pulling out a nail clipper and trimming one or two fingernails while talking to a client. The actual, easily evident effect was of startlement and disgust, an effect the boss never perceived, being confidently ensconced in his bubble. With earbuds, the toys have changed, but the noisome infants are ever uncaring.
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April 12, 2009
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