Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  But as a new medium for communication, texting requires a new set of unspoken rules, and the negotiations over the formation of these rules are currently causing a certain amount of tension and conflict – particularly the issue of whether mobile text is an appropriate medium for certain types of conversation. Flirting by text is accepted, even encouraged, but some women complain that men use texting as a way of avoiding talking. ‘Dumping’ someone by text message is widely regarded as cowardly and absolutely unacceptable, but this rule has not yet become firmly established enough to prevent some people from ending relationships in this manner.

  I have been studying all these ‘emerging’ rules for well over a decade, but it seems that the negotiations on mobile-phone etiquette are still in progress, and although there have been some developments and advances, they have yet to result in unequivocal agreement on any well-defined rules.

  Yes, Debrett’s famous etiquette guides now include sections on mobile-phone etiquette, text messaging and related subjects – and, yes, some of their advice reflects what the majority of English people would consider to be ‘good manners’ in the use of this technology. If asked, most would agree, for example, that you should ‘Ensure that your mobile phone conversation is not disturbing other people . . . don’t shout’ and that ‘Intimate conversations are never appropriate in front of others.’ In fact, the majority of English people were obeying these rules well before Debrett’s rather belatedly acknowledged the existence of mobile phones, and are still obeying them now. But a minority persist in defying them, and get away with it because the rest of us tend to be too squeamishly English to make a scene or draw attention to ourselves by confronting them.

  Even among the relatively courteous majority, some might have difficulty in obeying other Debrett’s diktats, such as their assertion that ‘People in the flesh deserve more attention than a gadget, so wherever possible turn off your phone in social situations.’ Many would agree to this in principle, but in practice, the choice in social situations is not between ‘people’ and ‘a gadget’ – it is between the people you happen to be with and your friends, family or colleagues who keep in touch with you by phone. For the younger generation, there are few social situations in which it would be unacceptable to leave your mobile phone switched on, or even to take or make calls. Even among older people, a casual social gathering, say, in a pub, would not require the turning off of mobiles.

  The Debrett’s ‘rules’ are far too simplistic and rigid. The emerging unwritten rules of mobile-phone etiquette are much more complex and nuanced – a matter of degrees and types and timing of mobile-phone use, with variations for different social contexts, rather than blanket ‘on or off’ prescriptions.

  The Three-degrees Rule

  There are three basic degrees of mobile-phone ‘use’ in social situations, graded from the most passive to the most active:

  •switched on

  •taking calls/reading messages (texts, emails, PMs40, etc.)

  •making calls/typing messages (texts, emails, PMs, etc.)

  In general terms, merely being passively ‘switched on’ is the least potentially offensive, more actively accepting calls or reading messages is more likely to cause offence, and actively making calls or typing messages is the most discourteous.

  Some may consider that reading messages is a slightly lesser offence than taking calls, and that sending typed messages is less discourteous than making calls. Reading and typing messages are, indeed, less obviously disruptive than actual phone conversations, as they can be done in silence, but they still generally involve ignoring the people one is with – they are the electronic equivalents of reading or writing postcards in a social situation – so I’m putting them in the same broad categories as taking or making calls.

  Some also argue that having your phone switched on but set to ‘vibrate’ rather than ring is, in courtesy terms, as good as having it switched off. But while a vibrating phone is certainly preferable to a ringing one in many situations, ‘vibrate’ is only the true social equivalent of ‘switched off’ if you completely ignore the phone when it vibrates – in which case it might as well be switched off.

  Other types of ‘silent’ mobile-phone use – such as surfing the internet, updating your blog or Facebook status, tweeting or playing games – can actually be considerably more discourteous than the apparently more disruptive ‘vocal’ uses, such as taking calls. This is because when you are surfing, Googling, blogging, tweeting or gaming you really are giving a gadget – an inanimate object – priority over your human companions. Yes, you are ‘talking’ to other humans when you blog, tweet or update your Facebook status, but randomly addressing hundreds or even thousands of people in this manner, in the hope that some of them might be interested, is not a conversation – and certainly not a vital one that can’t wait. It is bad enough to be neglected, even temporarily, while someone takes a call from a friend, colleague or family member – but to be neglected because they find Googling, tweeting or playing Angry Birds more interesting than your company is insulting. The rule of thumb is that if it would be rude to read a newspaper or magazine, write diaries or letters, or take out a deck of cards and play Patience41 in a given social situation, then it is equally impolite to do the equivalent on your mobile. (This may all sound rather obvious, but even government ministers have had to be told off for tweeting during cabinet meetings.)

  The only exception to this rule is when the internet is used to look something up as part of the conversation – using Google in the way that one might reach for a dictionary, encyclopaedia or other reference book in mid-conversation, for help in answering a question or resolving a debate. Even this legitimate reference-tool use, however, can become highly irritating if taken to excess, or employed when such help is not really needed. Gratuitous Googlers are regarded as rather childish – unable to sit still and listen to others without constant fiddling and fidgeting – or, even worse, as attention-seekers, trying to impress their companions with irrelevant factoids from Wikipedia.

  Many breaches of mobile-phone etiquette can be softened by a pre-emptive apology. Taking a call will certainly cause less offence if you say, ‘I’m so sorry, but I really have to take this,’ and ideally leave the room or at least move away so that your conversation does not disturb your companions, apologising again upon your return. These must be genuine apologies, not disguised boasts about how important you are. The English are acutely sensitive to even the most subtle forms of bragging, and an apology that breaks our modesty rules will compound your offence rather than mitigating it.

  In most situations, a (genuine) pre-emptive apology will also reduce the offence caused by ignoring your companions while you read or reply to an incoming text message or email. There are, however, very few conceivable situations in which one simply ‘must’ update one’s Facebook status, or tweet, or indulge in gratuitous Googling, so pre-emptive apologies for doing this will not minimise the offence.

  The Formality Rule

  As a general rule, the more formal the social gathering, the lower the degree of acceptable mobile-phone use. At very formal occasions, the phone should be switched off altogether. At, say, a less formal dinner with friends, it may be acceptable to leave it on ‘for emergencies’ (such as calls from one’s children or babysitter). At very casual get-togethers, such as sharing a few drinks in the pub, or impromptu encounters, even the higher degrees of phone use may be acceptable.

  The Numbers Rule

  The smaller the number of people at a social gathering, however informal it may be, the more one should focus on them and avoid using one’s phone. When just two friends get together, it would be rude and unfair for one to ignore the other and chat on a mobile with other people. With three people, it becomes marginally more acceptable for one person to have a very brief phone conversation or text exchange, providing the other two are happily chatting to each other and not feeling snubbed – although, in accordance with the three-degrees rule, taking
a call/reading a message would be more acceptable than actively making a call/texting. With four people, one might feel free to have a slightly longer phone conversation/text exchange, again assuming that the other three were clearly happily engaged with each other. And so on. At a large, informal social gathering, even actively making calls is generally acceptable.

  The Teenage Exception

  There are exceptions to the above rules among teenagers, which may also be seen among some ‘kidults’ in their twenties and even thirties. I’m using the term ‘teenage’ here as an indicator of maturity, rather than necessarily just of chronological age.

  Teenagers (and older kidults), who have grown up using mobile phones, tend to be highly skilled at a kind of ‘split-screen’ attention focus, which allows them, for example, to send text messages while simultaneously carrying on a conversation with the people around them. The texts may be of a poor literary standard, and the conversations may be somewhat disjointed and incoherent – but this is often the case even when the two activities are not performed in parallel.

  Also, most teenagers are quite simply much less ‘bothered’ than adults about the niceties of mobile-phone etiquette. They may recognise, and even be irritated by, the more blatant offences described above – but they are generally more tolerant of such rule-breaking. If two teenage girls are out having coffee together, for example, and one is chatting away to someone else on her mobile, her companion may feel somewhat aggrieved, but rather than launching into the normal English repertoire of disapproving frowns, sighs, coughs, tuts and eye-rolls, she will probably just take out her own mobile and start sending texts or making calls herself. Getting all huffy about the offence would be ‘uncool’ and she would be told to ‘chill’ or ‘get a life’.

  Among teenagers and kidults, it is now the norm for any face-to-face social interaction to be constantly intermingled with electronic social interaction – and the face-to-face variety is not given much, if any, priority over the electronic. A mobile phone ringing in the middle of a face-to-face social gathering is not seen as an interruption, but as another person joining in the conversation. Indeed, a phone may often be passed around to allow the absent party to exchange greetings or brief chat with other members of the group.

  Reactions to Rule-breaking: Body-language and Timed Frostiness Rules

  Older people are generally much less tolerant of mobile misdemeanours, but even the most discourteous and socially unacceptable mobile-phone use is very rarely penalised in any direct or obvious way. The English have a remarkable capacity for accepting the unacceptable – or, at least, appearing to accept it, and certainly not making a big noisy fuss about it.

  Unless you are close friends with your companions, the worst reaction you can expect for unacceptable use of your mobile is some disapproving body language. As you chat on your mobile, you may see raised eyebrows, frowns, eye-rolls, pursed lips and tapping feet or fingers, and hear sighs, tutting, pointed coughs, snorts and sniffs – and all the other barely noticeable signs of English outrage and indignation. (Our much-prized international reputation for ‘tolerance’ may well be partly thanks to this: we express any intolerance we may feel in such an understated manner that foreigners simply fail to notice it.)

  When you eventually finish your ill-timed phone-chat, there will be more severe punishment, in the form of a certain frostiness in your companions’ manner towards you. You have snubbed and ignored them while chatting on your mobile, so they will redress the balance and make things ‘fair’ by snubbing and ignoring you, often for an approximately equal amount of time. This remarkably accurate timing is not done consciously, but the English subconscious mind is quite precise in its calculation of fairness. And, yes, in accordance with the ‘test a social rule by breaking it’ principle, I deliberately committed breaches of mobile-phone etiquette, and timed both my offending phone calls and the duration of the resulting frostiness.

  If you are not English, a few frowns and sighs and a bit of frostiness may not seem very worrying. But these are indications that you have caused quite considerable offence, and should be taken seriously – assuming that you wish to fit in and get on with the English (and if you don’t, why on earth are you reading this book?). The only remedy is to apologise, immediately and profusely. A simple ‘sorry’ will not suffice. The English say ‘sorry’ all the time,42 over anything or nothing, so a single ‘sorry’ does not count as an apology.

  Mobile Phone Rules and Englishness

  Of course, many of the emerging unwritten rules and exceptions I have described here are not peculiarly English. I’m sure that the three-degrees rule, the numbers rule and the formality rule – and the teenage exception – apply at least to some extent in most countries in which mobile phones are now widely used. It is our reaction to breaches of these rules that is distinctive: our squeamishness about confronting offenders, and the way we express our outrage in barely visible nano-gestures, tiny facial twitches and minimalist coughs, sniffs and sighs. There is a non-verbal dialect of disapproval that almost deserves to be called ‘body English’, rather than the generic ‘body language’. More evidence of the social inhibitions and handicaps already flagged in previous chapters, which seem to be edging towards ‘defining characteristic’ status.

  The exquisite timing of our ‘frostiness’ is also a quintessentially English response – our own very tame and moderate version of the Law of Talion: not so much ‘an eye for an eye’ as ‘a five-minute snub for a five-minute snub’. Signs of social inhibition again, clearly – almost verging on passive-aggression here – combined with an acute sense of fairness.

  These reactions to rule-breaking may be distinctively English, but the rules of mobile-phone etiquette are still being negotiated, and it is difficult to predict the future course of the negotiations. It would be a mistake, for example, simply to assume that what is customary and acceptable among English teenagers today will necessarily become the universal norm here in the future. Adolescents do grow up, and their social behaviour as mature adults differs in many ways from their teenage habits. I observed earlier in this chapter that in business and professional contexts, higher-ranking people – people with nothing to prove about their status – tend to be more considerate and courteous in their mobile-phone use. This applies in purely social contexts as well: those who feel more socially secure and confident are less likely to display their popularity and draw attention to their busy social life by constantly taking and making calls. Teenagers and kidults tend to be highly socially insecure; as they mature, their need for such ‘conspicuous consumption’ of social connections should diminish.

  Having said that, my hunch is that a toned-down version of the current teenage practice of amalgamating face-to-face and electronic social interaction, with the face-to-face participants given only marginally higher priority, will increasingly become more normal and acceptable, at least at larger and more casual social gatherings.

  At the same time, as electronic communication becomes more and more commonplace, a mobile phone constantly pinging and bleeping with calls and messages is already becoming a far less effective indicator of one’s ‘social capital’ – and those who continue to flaunt their social wealth in this manner are regarded as rather tiresome. Already, you will gain considerably more social cachet and respect by cultivating a degree of aloofness and traditional English reserve towards your mobile, rather than responding immediately to its every ring or bleep like an over-excited puppy. Excessive eagerness in social interaction is seen as embarrassing and frowned upon, and this applies to electronic hyper-sociability as well – particularly now that the novelty of mobile communication has worn off.

  As I said, however, the rules of mobile-phone talk are still emerging. I hope that identifying more general, stable rules and ‘defining characteristics’ of Englishness will help us to predict, to some extent at least, the most likely future developments in this process.

  To discover these defining characteristics, we first ne
ed to examine the rules of a much more stable, established form of English communication: pub-talk.

  39. See K. Fox (2001), ‘Evolution, Alienation and Gossip: the role of mobile telecommunications in the 21st century’, www.sirc.org. (It’s a lot less pompous than the title makes it sound, but also now very out of date. There will be much more about this in my next book.)

  40. Private Messages or Personal Messages on internet social media sites.

  41. The card-game known as Solitaire in the US.

  42. To be precise, the national average is at least eight ‘sorries’ a day, although some of us regularly say ‘sorry’ more than twenty times a day – see page 236 for more detail.

  PUB-TALK

  The pub is a central part of English life and culture. That may sound like a standard guidebooky thing to say, but I really mean it: the importance of the pub in English culture cannot be over-emphasised. More than three-quarters of the adult population go to pubs, and over a third are ‘regulars’, visiting the pub at least once a week. For many it is a second home. It also provides the perfect ‘representative sample’ of the English population for any social scientist, as pubs are frequented by people of all ages, all social classes, all education-levels and every conceivable occupation. It would be impossible even to attempt to understand Englishness without spending a lot of time in pubs, and it would almost be possible to achieve a good understanding of Englishness without ever leaving the pub.

  I say ‘almost’ because the pub – like all drinking-places, in all cultures – is a special environment, with its own rules and social dynamics. My colleagues at SIRC and I have conducted quite extensive cross-cultural research on drinking-places43 (well, someone had to do it), which showed that drinking is, in all societies, essentially a social activity, and that most cultures have specific, designated environments for communal drinking. Our research revealed three significant cross-cultural similarities or ‘constants’ regarding such drinking-places: