-
1
Mobile phone lanes for pedestrians in the city of
Chongqing: a phenomenological account1.
Toward the middle of September 2014, a number of internet media
(including
Time2, TheGuardian3, Scmp4 and Techtimes5) report the opening of
a dedicated
pedestrian lane for mobile phone users in the municipality of
Chongqing (China). To be
sure, the spokesman of the company responsible of the works made
clear, in a public
statement, that the construction of this walkway was intended to
be ironic. However, I
take it for granted that the only way of properly understanding
an irony is by taking it
seriously and this is especially true in an era where the
difficulty to assess the credibility, veracity and pertinence of
information is increasingly overwhelming. Thus,
in order to be able to grasp the significance of this initiative
we should not think of it as
a parody and not even as a public advice about the dangers of
walking around while
using our textphones; rather, let us take as a fact what is
merely being simulated, and
regard this dedicated lane as a safety device purported at
segregating normal pedestrians from those using textphones, in
order to avoid accidents.
The technology under question is, as previously noted, an
assemblage of two
technologies: the smartphone and the signaled urban lane. What
makes an assemblage
interesting is that the elements assembled may be connected to
each other directly, and
they may show an interface to the user. In this case, we observe
that both elements are
used synchronically, with no direct connection between them.
This is due to the fact that
the user benefits from the assemblage by placing herself between
the two elements. One can explain the meaning of this expression by
turning toward Ihdes conceptual framework.
This synchronic functioning of the two technological elements
involved in the
assemblage is secured by the fact that they belong to different
strata of the users experience. More specifically, the user is
related with her mobile phone through
relations which are mainly of mediation and of alterity, and she
is mainly related to the
pedestrian lane through a background relation. We would be
mistaken if we took these
relations to be pure so that each technology played a single
role. Actually, the signals in the pavement (see fig.1) precisely
serve to establish a relation of mediation with the
pedestrian, which has both an embodied and a hermeneutic
dimension. The embodied
element of this relation is provided by the signal as such, as a
device that attracts the
attention of the pedestrian in a manner that goes beyond itself;
for this signal is a
symbolic device with a meaning, and therefore is interpreted as
belonging to the system
of urban signalization. Thus, it is not the painting in the
floor that I am looking, but a
1 I, Jose Carlos Caizares, born in October 26th in 1982, submit
this essay to the Admissions Committee
of Twente University by the date of March 12th in 2015, and
hereby I declare to have written it
independently. If we leave this note out of the count, the essay
has a length of 4 pages and 2000 words. 2
http://time.com/3376782/chongqing-smartphone-sidewalk-meixin-group/
3
http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/sep/15/china-mobile-phone-lane-distracted-walking-
pedestrians 4
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1593100/chongqing-opens-dedicated-sidewalk-lane-mobile-
phone-users 5
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/15677/20140917/cell-phone-users-in-chinese-city-of-chongqing-
gets-exclusive-pedestrian-lane-good-idea.htm
-
2
signal that prescribes or advices a certain behavior through
which I will also predict
other pedestrians behavior. Yet this signal is inscribed in a
pedestrian lane, which is also a technology by itself. Indeed, a
lane is formed by a line painted in the pavement,
and neither the pavement (which, after all, separates the
walkway from the road) nor the
lane are innocuous; for they both have bodily aspects that
impinge on our experience,
and they both constitute a hermeneutic frame through which the
pedestrian perceives
her walking. In particular, the pedestrian sees a lane as a
lane, as a possible path for a
pre-defined user which will not certainly be a car.
Fig. 1. Pedestrian lanes for mobile phone users and non-users in
the city of Chongqing.
The fact that a lane demands its own signaling is here also of
the utmost
importance. Unless we live in a modern European city, where most
lanes in the
walkways can be promptly interpreted as bicycle lanes, we could
justifiably doubt that
there is any point in having painted an unsignalised lane, for
that would amount to
making a further division in an already too segmented
environment, and one which
serves no purpose. Therefore, a device whose hermeneutical
mediation is culturally
stable is a device that is apt for the removal of labels and
other symbolic devices
helping that mediation, such as instruction guides: these items
are now generally
perceived as redundant and at some point can be suppressed.
However, being a new and
thus still not assimilated technology, the mobile phone lane
needs explicit signaling to
help building the hermeneutic aspect of the mediation relation
that the user will
establish with it.
This straight line painted in the floor, along with the signals
referring to mobile
phones and the behaviors expected from the distinct types of
pedestrians thus
constituted, forms a whole device with many dimensions, both
bodily and hermeneutic,
which allow its users to establish a complex and multifaceted
relation of mediation with
it. From a phenomenological standpoint, the pedestrian lane
forces a particular look
upon it and upon the city in general: this city is a city where
cars have their
environment, bikes theirs, and still there are distinct
environments for distinct types of
pedestrian. These environments are largely extrinsic and opposed
to one another. The
common pedestrian is no longer the pedestrian who walks along
the pavement: she is
the pedestrian who walks along the mobile phone non-users lane.
Now the street is not
-
3
simply the place for me to walk around: if I am a mobile phone
non-user, the street also
becomes the place where the mobile phone user is an other for
me, someone that has
different rights and duties from me, and I presume- also
different experiences; but she (theoretically) stops being someone
who I could collide with, thus suffering an accident.
Indeed, that is what this pedestrian lane is purported for.
Then, the lane builds a peculiar embodiment relation with its
user. It amplifies the
bodily space within which I must not be obstructed, space which
is mine; conversely, it lessens the space within which I should
exert some vigilance toward possible
obstacles in my walk. Now this transformation that we undergo at
the level of embodied
relation is not confined to any sensory field in particular: it
involves changes in features
of my vision, my audition and yet my tactile experience.
Moreover, the hermeneutic
dimension of this relation also produces as we have seen-
changes in alterity relations. Those changes do not merely affect
the background of our experience: in redistributing
the objects which should appear within the various horizons of
experience in each side
of the lane, and in prescribing a particular behavior for users
in each of them, an entirely
new regime of types of perceptions is developed here. Thus, the
transformational effect of this double pedestrian lane is profound,
although it can usually go unnoticed.
According to Ihdes concepts, and having in mind its impact upon
our embodied experience of space, but also the alterity relations
which are built within it and the
prescriptive value of signs upon our behaviors, I contend that
the lane effects a
transformation of high contrast in our experience.
So far we have described the mediation relation that we can
establish with this
two-lane pavement setting from the perspective of the pedestrian
user. But, as it was
suggested above, the mediation relation is not the principal
relation that we have with
this technology, just as the mediation relation is not the
outstanding one we hold with a
street in general. Nor it is intended to be. When I walk across
the street I am stepping on
the floor and this action clearly mediates my perception, but
not in a noticeable way for
me; instead, I am attentive to the shop windows, or I am having
a conversation with
some passer-by, or I am texting a message; meanwhile, the floor
and my stepping on it
usually sink in my perceptive field, thereby becoming a part of
its background.
In fact, this general property of walking is what makes possible
the predominantly
background character of the mobile phone users lane too. In
other words: the
background relation that the walker establishes with the lane is
what enables her to synchronically- establish a mediation relation
with her smartphone while walking.
Further, it can be argued that this setting, in turn, is what
caused the need for
segregating smartphone users and non-users in the first
place.
These two propositions take us to briefly reflect on the
technological relations
constituted by the person-as-a-smartphone-user. The smartphone
is a typically
interactive technology: with it we constitute relations of
mediation (with its pad, with
contents, with other people) and of alterity (we clean its
screen, we update it). The key to understanding the nature of these
relations is to consider the main functionality
of the smartphone, which is to provide communicative services
mainly through two
channels: auditive (speaking/listening) and visual-tactile
(writing/reading). In principle,
we are used to speak on the phone as we walk, no matter that the
conversation is distant.
One of the enormous changes in experience brought about by the
smartphone lie, rather,
in the fact that it is also a textphone. Indeed, as the
smartphone can be grabbed with one
hand and it integrates a supporting surface for the pad, we no
longer need to write
before a desk, sitting on a chair. Thus it frees our hands and
our bodies, with the
consequence that we can walk while writing. However, this
freedom comes at a cost,
because the reduced size of the smartphone forces a sequential
writing with one or two
-
4
fingers, which contrasts with the smooth dancing of all our
fingers upon the keyboard of
a laptop. What is more: with respect to the laptop, our visual
experience gets confined to
a smaller space, where buttons are more difficult to distinguish
from one another. Thus
it demands more attention, and our awareness of the surroundings
is low compared to
that of the laptop-user or the regular pedestrian. We can walk
while texting, yes: but in an urban context this becomes
occasionally dangerous. Relations of background
become now discontinuous and flurry, and I lose consciousness of
my operative bodily
space. So, the simultaneous compatibility of texting and walking
reveals itself imperfect
after all.
We know how the rest of the story goes. This reduced awareness
of my
surroundings amounts to a disruption of my
background-as-pedestrian, which reduces
my active controlling of my spatial immediate field, thus
increasing the probability of
my having accidents. This is rapidly noticed by many, and it
rapidly escalates to
municipal officers, who interpret this fact as the
disfunctionality of an assemblage
formed by smartphone pedestrian users within the city as a
complex background with
cars, lamp-posts, other pedestrians, etcetera.
In trying to remedy this disfunctionality, a number of
possibilities arise. The
construction of a new assemblage which segregates walking lanes
is one possibility that
imports the technological intentionalities of the smartphone and
the pedestrian lane to
this assembled setting, thereby offering the perspective of a
renewed setting that
manages its own technological aggregate intentionality in a
functional manner (one that
prevents accidents). Although the good results of the
segregation of road, bicycle and
pedestrian traffic determine that the construction of separate
pedestrian lanes for mobile
phone users and non-users is a plausible solution to the issue,
it is not the only one: thus,
the co-existence of smartphones and pedestrian lanes does not
necessarily end up in
segregating walkways for smartphone users and non-users. Other
possibilities, such as
enforcing a law that prohibited texting while walking, could
have arisen; its eventual
rejection is in part, but not wholly, conditioned by the
previous rejection of similar
measures, just as the implementation of this double-lane is
conditioned by the previous
assimilation of the bicycle lane in an urban setting. The
assemblage, however, does not
appear as an inevitable consequence of the accumulation of
technological layers that
force particular relations and behaviors, but as a convenient
solution that, nonetheless,
leaves room for disagreement, disorder and the emergence of
counterfactual
examination and relations of use.
