Mobile communication proves that quality is better than quantity

So we had to fall back on telegrams. People linked together by close friendship, affection, or physical love found themselves reduced to hunting for tokens of their past communion within the compass of a ten-word telegram. And since, in practice, the phrases one can use in a telegram are quickly exhausted, long lives passed side by side, or passionate yearnings, soon declined on the exchange of such trite formulas as “Am fit. Always thinking of you. Love.”
- Albert Camus, The Plague)

In Camus’s tale of plague-quarantined Oran, his allegory of France under Nazi occupation, the compass granted by the telegram is viewed as limited and unsatisfactory. Its ten words admitting only the trite, Camus assumes an inevitable diminution of personal relations. How differently we view such matters today. No longer bothered by the trite, we view the similarly limited compass granted by our own personal telegraph machine – the mobile phone and its text messaging facility – as enriching and expanding personal relations.

We take a contrary view to that of Camus because we feel we have the killer advantage: quantity. For what our new telegrams lack in subtlety, we think to ourselves, they more than make up in volume. So if, using our mobile phones, we can communicate more frequently and more easily with a wider group of people then, our assumption goes, our personal relations must be better than ever, and certainly superior to those of the poor, pox-marked inhabitants of Oran.

Yet the assumption of our advantage can be challenged on several grounds. One could argue that the equation of greater quantity with increased satisfaction is likely to be as flawed in the area of personal communication as it’s proving in areas such as consumer goods. One could also argue that the stylisation of the text – whether mobile voice call or text message (both are likely to be more stylised than other exchanges) – has a profound effect on the exchange that is neither neutralised, nor compensated for, by quantity. Indeed, surely quantity only contributes to it.

However, I’m concerned about the idea of quantity itself and whether, in the sphere of personal relations and the mobile phone, quantity is all it seems. In other words, when are talking and “texting” not also communicating?

To answer or not to answer?

In a recent article in The Age(“I’ll call you”, 3 November 2003), Claire Halliday discussed the issue of mobile phones and how they are changing expectations of punctuality. The article suggested that mobile phones are creating a notion of “soft time”, whereby appointments are deferred by the device of phoning ahead at the appointed time.

The article includes the diaries of two people on a typical “mobile day” and it is here that we get a hint about the first problem with quantity: the issue of control.

One person notes in her diary the following:

I have a girlfriend who’s a real chatterbox and I don’t have time for a conversation so I SMS [short message service] her to confirm some plans about meeting tomorrow night. Texting means I don’t have to talk.

The other person, too, refers implicitly to the issue:

My Aunty Janette calls to see how I am getting on. She lives alone so, when I see her number come up, I usually always take her call just in case anything is wrong.

The fact that the speaker takes the call on this occasion only points to the number of occasions when she doesn’t.

In both cases, in a perception no doubt familiar to all mobile phone users, the speaker views herself as being able to control the potential interaction – its mode (voice call versus text message), even its occurrence (to answer or not to answer). But is this a question of communication at all? Is it a question of communication when one is not so much relating to another, as evading another? Moreover, is it a question of communication when the terms of the interaction are being solely determined by one party? For if communication presupposes a dialogue (in effect, if not actuality), which I think, in turn, can mean nothing other than a presumption of parity, how do we classify such a one-sided affair? And if at least some of our exchanges using a mobile phone are about evasion and non-parity, can they be as nutritive of personal relations as we’d like to believe? To put it another way, can such exchanges be counted in our tally of communication? If we subtract them, as it seems we must, our idea of quantity starts to look a little more modest.

Time in lieu

The same article gives various examples of how people exploit the notion of “soft time”. It cites job candidates ringing ahead at interview time to say they will be late, and once-punctual parents ringing day-care centres at supposed pick-up times to advise they are on their way. As the article sums it up, “8:30 is still 8:00 as long as your voice arrives on time”.

And here is the second problem with the idea of quantity. As with the issue of control, a phone call is not necessarily communication, and in this case, it’s quite a different beast altogether. It’s no exaggeration to say that, in this case, the phone call or message is doing duty for the person’s very being. That is, the phone call or message is sent out as a kind of proxy or advance party in lieu of the “real” person. And like calls and messages predicated on evasion and non-parity, it would seem very difficult to classify this as communication. Indeed, unlike the former which, after all, still concerns relation – albeit negatively – this second type of case doesn’t seem to concern relation at all, unless it’s the relation of the real “self” to the proxy “self”.

You might object that this situation – the substitution of the phone call for the person’s presence – is an extreme or unusual case. Yet, to a greater or lesser extent, all personal interactions involve a representation or proxy of the self; this example simply makes it clearer than usual. And if this extreme case is not classifiable as communication, it suggests there are other, less extreme examples of phone calls and messages where communication and relation are also in abeyance. In summary, if we subtract these “non-relational” phone calls and messages from our tally of personal communication, our conceit of quantity becomes more modest still.

And once we’ve deflated the ludicrous claims of quantity in personal communications to more realistic proportions, what are we left with? Probably something not too dissimilar to the case of Oran: a populace using whatever means available to communicate, but doomed, like all human beings, to scrabbling for tokens of communion in words and signs that no matter their number, are always too few, too late.