Cell phones in public

[mmcirvin]

inkerx started a fascinating little discussion about why people are irritated by cell phone use in places where face-to-face conversation would be perfectly OK (that is, not in a movie theater or library, but, say, in a restaurant or grocery store). His first guess was that it was a holdover from the recent era when mobile phones were a luxurious ostentation, but that doesn't sound quite right to me.

Speaking personally, it doesn't annoy me that much, but flemco in the first comment said what I was going to say, that many people reflexively talk much more loudly into telephones than they would to a physically present person (even though this usually does no favors for the transmitted sound quality). I wonder if this is correlated with the phone's audio volume setting--maybe if the voice at the other end sounds quiet to you, you'll talk louder to compensate. Another phenomenon that eugeniatodd mentioned is that cell phone conversations will sometimes cause people to tune out their surroundings and cause delays when, say, they're standing in line (though face-to-face conversations can do that too).

But further down, takhisis proposed a very interesting and plausible theory, that the widespread annoyance at this has to do with our expectation of how a conversation sounds. If you hear two people talking to each other with the cadence and pauses characteristic of a conversation, it registers as "two people talking to each other" and it's possible to tune it out as not of interest (unless you're eavesdropping). If you only hear one side of that conversation, it doesn't sound like a conversation but like a series of disconnected utterances, and the "utterance possibly addressed to me" detector in your head triggers over and over and over. It makes some sense that the level of annoyance would vary greatly from person to person; when I'm concentrating on something I'm notoriously oblivious even to people directly addressing me, so this may not be as irritating to me.

What makes me find this theory plausible is that I know how easily a tiny change in the timing of a conversation can derail it completely. If you've ever talked to somebody over a satellite link or laggy videoconferencing system that adds a quarter-second or longer delay to every utterance, you know what I'm talking about. Our social expectations about such things as the pause between statements in a conversation when both parties have something to say are delicately tuned.

Maybe cell phones need outward-directed speakers that constantly mutter "mwa wah mwa" like an adult in a Charlie Brown cartoon. THAT will make them less annoying!

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It's also an observation so common as to have become a cliche for weak standup comics and cartoonists that someone talking on a mobile phone, particularly with a hands-free headset, greatly resembles a mentally ill person talking to a hallucination. This may actually be another annoyance--as well as "utterance possibly directed to me" we could be subconsciously detecting "possibly mentally ill person" with all the social biases and wariness that go with that.

[smashingstars.livejournal.com]

I get the most irritated when people using a headset look directly at me when speaking into their phone. It happens relatively frequently, always from college-aged people, and I wonder if it's because they reflexively want to look at a face while engaged in conversation. Or if their attention is so split that they forget to stop themselves from staring.

For a purely anecdotal data point, I dislike the delay caused by distracted cell phone speakers in shopping lines. I think people on a cell phone at a restaurant are rude to the people they're sitting with. The ringing of the phone and the loudness of the speaker's voice are bothersome. Also, the conversation is often really shallow: "Yeah, I know. Totally. I mean, yeah. Yeah, what's up with that? I know! Oh my god of course! Yes. Definitely. Yeah me too."

Perhaps the people hearing the other person's conversation aren't so irritated.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

I was going to say that two-way radio conversations have the same lag issue, because radios are typically used in settings where one or the other party is multitasking (we use them at Bumbershoot, for example), but there the lag is expected and if you're using a handheld speaker/mic, both sides of the conversation can be heard anyway. (This leads to a related problem of setting your volume just right so that you can hear it but you're not irritating the people around you.)

I don't get annoyed by phone conversations, even at work where people aren't supposed to do that (I'm pretty lax about it if they're speaking quietly and don't have a seriously annoying ringtone, though if you're talking on a phone during a movie I'll do my best to get your ass ejected). What does piss me off is when someone's asking me for help AND talking on the phone at the same time. That's just rude. Finish the conversation, THEN I'll help you. You wouldn't want the clerk to answer the phone while he's supposed to be helping you, after all.

I read somewhere that the reason people talk louder on cellphones is that the outlying overtones of the human voice are stripped from the signal, so what you hear from the other person sounds fainter and tinnier than you expect. This leads people to think that the signal is poor, so they compensate by speaking loudly. Only, cell phone sound quality has improved substantially in the last several years, so this no longer really applies.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The equation of low volume with poor signal (even though this is true almost nowhere other than AM radio) is also, I think, part of the reason for the well-known phenomenon of progressively worse dynamic compression and clipping in music recordings. Given a choice between two sound reproduction systems or two different signals, as long as they're not too atrocious, people will usually rate the louder one as being of higher quality, independent of any other characteristics. The commercial effect may even be exaggerated by recording engineers' lore, as this guy suggests (http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/imperfect-sound-forever.htm)*. That creates a powerful incentive to make your recording or radio station sound as loud as possible (http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/imperfect-sound-forever.htm) for a given volume setting, and since prevailing practice sets the standard people use to judge these things, it's a vicious cycle that eventually destroys the quality of sound reproduction as everything gets wedged against the ceiling.

*He also mentions that radio stations add their own compression of the dynamic range, on top of what's in the recording. This actually makes some practical sense to me, since radio is particularly likely to be listened to in cars, and I know that in a car, classical recordings with a large dynamic range can be unlistenable; the engine noise drowns out the quiet passages unless you turn it up to a volume that is unpleasant and dangerous in the loud bits. We've got a CD of Respighi's The Pines of Rome that is comically useless in a vehicle. I've sometimes thought that what we really need is receiver-side dynamic compression in car stereos that automatically scales itself somehow to the amount of engine noise.

[mskala.livejournal.com]

I've heard the "one side of a conversation is much more distracting than both sides" theory several times before, and I think it's pretty convincing. Also note that when people object, they usually say "It's rude" rather than objectionable in some other way. Why is it "rude" in particular? Because it's triggering the "Pay attention to me!" interrupt falsely. Being exposed to such a person feels like being exposed to someone who constantly (rudely) interrupts you with irrelevant comments in a conversation, even if on a rational conscious level you're aware that the cell phone user isn't having a conversation with you, and doesn't actually want your attention at all.

I think the cell-phone user's speech may be perceived as louder than normal conversation even if it objectively isn't, because the pattern of the speech causes the hearer's brain to attach "this is important" metadata to it, as would also happen with loud sounds.

On a related note, during the last few years of the time that I was living with my parents and two sisters, I had to get up early in the morning to take a long bus ride to school, and as a result go to bed significantly before most of the other people in the house. They'd have conversations after my bedtime that I could clearly hear, making it difficult for me to go to sleep.

I would complain, and my family would respond by lowering their voices, to the point that I could still clearly hear that they were having a conversation, but only actually get about half the words. I tried to explain that that just wouldn't do - the lowered-voice conversation was more distracting because my brain would automatically try to decode as much as possible. In order to really be helpful, they would have to actually whisper - stop voicing the sounds - so that I wouldn't hear enough voice sounds to trigger decoding. It was voice sounds that were the problem, not loudness. But I was never able to get them to comprehend the qualitative different between speaking softly and whispering.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of the discomfort I have with having a one-sided conversation, where I cannot see the other person; some people can yammer endlessly into a phone connection and not seem to want for feedback (Hello, mothers of the world!), while I will interrupt myself with "are you still there?/can you hear me [now]?" and just annoy the person I'm trying to inform.

However, this sort of thing does let you determine who among your listeners is listening, and who is just waiting for a chance to speak.

I've also read that when people talk to computers that're capable of listening to them, they experience an uncanny valley effect where they get uncomfortable and lose their own cadence because they're not getting feedback from the machine. Someone observed this, and programmed the computer to feed back with "uhuh" and "mm" and other I'm-still-with-you noises and people could talk to it longer. (Actually, I don't recall whether the people were talking to a machine or just told that they were-- the computer's a bit of a macguffin in such a test.)

Presumably when the first few generations of computers that can listen to and understand english come out, people will do the usual things such as speaking very loudly, attempt an article-free pidgin, or a few nerds will try some programming-formatted speech. That'd make for a good Xckd someday.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I've had this conversation with others and someone also suggested the half-a-conversation theory. I think it's a combination of all three; people tune out, thereby talking more loudly, and exposing you to a loud half-conversation. The end result is someone gets their phone crammed in their mouth while someone on the other end asks, "Are you in a tunnel?"

[elfbiter.livejournal.com]

I've heard people continuing a domestic dispute through a cell phone or loudly talking about sensitive business as if they were alone, I wonder if some poeple still have an illusion some car owners seem to have - that the device somehow automatically makes their speech or behavior private...

[mezdeathhead.livejournal.com]

There's a certain nosiness about it, too. I think when you can hear both sides of a conversation, you can quickly and easily decide if it's something that warrants eavesdropping, and if it's not of interest, you can ignore them. When you only hear half the conversation, you want to know what they're talking about so that you can decide if you want to be nosy, but it's often more difficult to tell. For some reason I can't ignore something if I don't know what it's about.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking some more about that strange choice to have the adults make wordless trombone-like noises in the Peanuts cartoons, which I think is actually related to this. Schulz's comic strip portrayed child-adult conversations by just showing the child's side, with the adult's side implied, much in the manner of Bob Newhart's "telephone" routines. But Newhart got away with this in person because the whole setup was that he was pretending to talk on a telephone; actually doing that in a screen depiction of a face-to-face conversation, with silences for the adult's statements, would be pretty disturbing.

I recall seeing the kids' TV show "The Big Comfy Couch" actually doing this when a character is talking to a stuffed animal--there are these long static shots of the teddy bear being silent in response, I guess so that the kids' imagination can fill in; but it just comes off as unsettling, much like the recent popular pastime of removing Garfield's thought balloons to change the comic strip's character study of Jon from puerile to harrowing.

Hearing half of a telephone conversation in a social context where face-to-face talk is expected might be similar in principle.

[thette.livejournal.com]

My father talks louder on the phone the further away the person on the other end is.

[megmimcg.livejournal.com]

For example, the implication of talking on a cell phone in lieu of interacting with a store clerk is that the clerk is not worthy of a face to face conversation - to me that is downright dehumanizing. I have on numerous occasions also witnessed an adult jabbing away on a cell phone to someone while sitting at a table at a restaurant for dinner with the family - and the person on the phone will actually hush the rest of the family while the phone conversation continues. For goodness sake - is it that tough to sit and converse or interact with the people that are acutally in front of you instead of calling someone else on the phone? sheesh.

[megmimcg.livejournal.com]

Another thing that makes it annoying even if the cell phone user is alone is that the minutae must be explained because the other person is not physically present - the things proceed as if the conversation were really a script with stage notes "yeah - I'm walking by the frozen vegetables - no, just shopping for dinner....ok there are 4 types of peas - should I get the ones with carrots?.." etc etc. The same conversation between 2 people in the room would go something like this "want peas?" "yeah - lets get some".

[sirreality.livejournal.com]

I've heard the one-sided conversation theory before, and it makes a lot of sense.

One other thing with cell phones -- A land phone connection feeds back your own voice to you so that you have some idea how loud you are and can modulate your volume. File under "if I can hear me, so can they." A cell phone connection does not, so everyone tends to talk louder.

or...

[(Anonymous)]

or maybe it's because the cell phone user is taken out of his or her current context.

i.e., they are in a grocery store, however their conversation is distracting their mind to somewhere else. all other actions are affected by this - vocal volume, latency in "processing" their current physical context, etc. This doesnt happen in face to face conversations, which are, by definition, in-context.

[wonderloey.livejournal.com]

I think that part of the annoyance with the one-sided conversation is that often you don't pick up any sense in it. The cadence is all wrong.

However, you also get people that take advantage of the half heard conversation.. and discuss things they wouldn't normally discuss in public.

I'm not interested in the pubic hair of strangers.. So why do they insist on inflicting it on me?