Would you like some tech with that?

“In making certain things easier for people, technology has actually demotivated people from using their brains. We have all these devices that keep us connected, and yet we're more disconnected than ever before. Why is that?”

- Emilio Estevez

It is a scene all too familiar with the masses of restaurant staff throughout the country nowadays, or at least one very common in metropolitan areas. It can be a group of young teenagers, an older couple enjoying a relaxing meal, or a family with small children. But no matter the age demographic, generation gap or social function at hand (drinks with friends, family meal, etc)., many of these food-seekers have one thing in common: they can’t step away from their technology. As in, they spend their whole meal checking their phones, playing with their tablets, or (in the case of the families with little kids) watching movies. Yes, I personally see this countless times every single shift I work at a particular family-friendly, “premium casual” restaurant in the middle of Los Angeles: parents who set up their tablet or phone in front of their kid and have them watch a movie or television or play a game instead of interacting with the family unit.

I was immediately reminded of this specific spectacle in Chapter V: “The Social-Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” in Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. For such a lengthy title, older publication date (1962) and complex examination of the historical and social ramifications of the “public sphere”, Habermas’s analyses are nevertheless thoroughly applicable to contemporary outlooks on societal dynamics. By referencing H. Schelsky’s observation that the power of the family on an individual’s social development and connection to the public sphere lost much of its influence from “the elimination… of all aspects not directly relevant to task performance,” Habermas saw that “individual family members are now socialized by extrafamilial authorities, by society directly” (156). Habermas does not seem to address this directly, but it is more than likely he was primarily focused on the socialization of upper to middle class, white males, since throughout much of history, the disenfranchisement of women and minorities coupled with the poor education levels of the lower class made it so that those operating in the public sphere constituted only a small part within the larger community. As such, Habermas noted that with the rise of the public sphere and the middle-class’s participation within in, more and more individuals (read: educated white men) began to construct their identities as reflections of society or their intellectual peers and sought outlets of social interaction separate from their families by engaging in discussions in public spaces. The result was that “privatized individuals… [formed] a public [that] reflected critically and in public on what they had read, thus contributing to the process of enlightenment (Habermas 51). However, with  the shift towards capitalism and the “disengagement from the functional complex of social labor in general,” Habermas saw that the family “increasingly lost also the functions of upbringing and education, protection, care and guidance” (Habermas 154-55).

I can recognize the loss in family “functions” each time I see a child sitting at a table with his or her parents staring at a cell phone or tablet screen, interacting more with the technology than with their family unit. To this effect, the child is “socialized” by technology, making their interactions and understanding of how this particular technology can be incorporated into their lives paramount to their relationship with their parents or social group. It is that loss of connection, of basic interaction between members of a family that have me, at the rather young age of twenty-five, feel nostalgic for the time before technology was so prevalent. That is not to say that I myself do not rely on technology – I am, after all, relying a computer, an internet connection and an internal spell-checker to do a great deal of the work for this blog posting. Moreover, I will acknowledge here that for some parents, this is probably the best way to keep their kid focused on something so they do not end up running around the restaurant screaming their heads off – and for the children who do end up doing just that, I always wonder if giving them a computer screen would calm them down. However, it does not seem that we, as a society, are making a cautious enough consideration to how this will – note how I do not say might – impact the upcoming generations’ abilities to perform, interact and participate in what Habermas deems the “rational-critical debate” central to the public sphere. 

On the other hand, Habermas does offer up a sort of support to the idea that outside influences – namely, technology – can bring people together in the realm of the public. He quotes William H. Whyte who says  that “doing things with other people… even watching television together… helps make one more of a real person” (158). I would have to disagree slightly with Whyte in this aspect, as I do not see physical or communal activities such as playing sports or watching television the same as our culture’s dependence on individualized, hand-held devices. I do not think checking my email, responding to text messages or surfing the web on my phone results in the same sort of group dynamic that would come from, say, watching a movie with my friends. Even in the darkened, quiet theatre, there is a sense of the private (i.e. me solely focused on the screen in front of me), but then afterwards, there always seems to be the social factor: debating the movie, talking about particular scenes, discussing our interpretations, etc. I rarely find myself involving other people in the various functions of my phone (email, texts, etc.), and even then, I do not think showing someone a photo on my phone or a text from someone else elicits the same “rational-critical” debate that might follow a movie viewing.

In the end, I must admit that I do have reservations about how the generations raised entirely in the “technologic” or “networked” age will operated in regards to social dynamics, and how they will connect with (or disconnect from) the public sphere, that is, if there is still anything resembling Habermas’s idea at all. My fear is that technology is pushing individual users more readily and with faster and faster connectivity into the realm of the private, one that seems to incorporate the rhetoric of the public sphere (i.e. phones and devices that allow you to “connect” instantly with others; instantaneous search results; dynamic social networking) without any of the positive results. Indeed, sometimes it seems to me that even with our multiple devices that promise connections and encourage conversation, we are actually moving towards a diminished sense of a “rational-critical debate”, as it may come one day when the majority of those who would participate readily in the public sphere do not know or understand how to make personal, face-to-face connections with those around them.

Photo: PCWorld.com

One last thing to think about: Eva, a Los Angeles restaurant (sadly, not the one I work at), will apparently give diners a 5% discount if they give up their phones and devices before being seated. According to owner Mark Gold, about half of diners have done so, and the goal in doing this is to

“create that environment of home, and we want people to connect again. It’s about two people sitting together and just connecting, without the distraction of a phone, and we’re trying to create an ambiance where you come in and really enjoy the experience and the food and the company.” (Hsu 1)

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Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991. Print.

Hsu, Tiffany. “L.A. restaurant pays customers to put away their phones.” The Los Angeles Times. latimes.com. 15 August 2012. Web. 23 September 2012.