I am he as you are he as you are me

Ran into a neighbor on the street this morning in full rant mode about cell phones in restaurants; apparently he'd been having a rather nice dinner with a friend at Upstairs on the Square when they were suddenly transformed into the unwilling audience of some yakker's Theatre du Moi. What, we asked ourselves, is up with that? (Or, rather, he asked it of me, repeatedly. It was starting time at the elementary school across the street and I was busy trying to keep a very muddy-pawed Milo from enthusiastically greeting the swarm of children around us. Have you ever tried to keep a child-loving dog away from dog-loving children? It's not easy.)

I'm curious about this because all I hear, ever, is people complaining about how rude cell phone use in public is. And then I see people talking on cell phones in public constantly. Do these two groups of people ever overlap? They must. And there's no pro-CPUP (as we shall designate "cell phone use in public") lobby out there, arguing that CPUP is perfectly acceptable. So, as a psychologist, I'm interested in the question of what happens in the mind of someone who believes CPUP is rude, yet engages in CPUP anyway. How do they rationalize the cognitive dissonance?

My neighbor didn't seem particularly interested in that question, though; he wanted answers, dangnabbit. So I pointed out that all over, boundaries between public space and private space seem to be breaking down. People behave in a movie theater as they do in their own homes or on a subway as they do in their own cars. To some extent, I think, this is the result of the dismantling of formal social conventions that happened in the 60s and 70s. But technology has accelerated the breakdown enormously. When you can watch a DVD on your big-screen TV, eating "movie-style" popcorn, it can be hard to remember when you go to a movie theater that you are out in public, now. We have so many luxuries in our own homes that used to be the province of the public sphere. And the responsibilities of public life intrude on the privacy of the home--it seems everyone is e-mailing their boss from a home computer, or check their Blackberry from vacation, these days. So the habits of having different sets of manners for different circumstances--at home, at work, at play--disintegrate as the boundaries between home, work, and play do.

Neighbor liked this line of reasoning pretty well, and added his own spin on it--"It's like the Gap phenomenon," he said, "Where you can see a four-year-old and an 18-year-old and a 40-year-old and an 80-year-old and they're all wearing the same outfit. Clothes used to distinguish between children and adults, but they don't necessarily anymore."

Good point, and one that echoes mine below about how dressing more formally for formal occasions not only makes you appropriate for those occasions, but makes it more possible for you to communicate your intent to relax, to talk off the record, to be "backstage" instead of "onstage" when you dress informally.