If Romeo and Juliet had mobile phones - Barry Wellman
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459505
13
MMC1110.1177/2050157912459505Mobile Media & CommunicationWellman and Rainie
Social stakes at play
Mobile Media & Communication
If Romeo and Juliet
1(1) 166–171
© The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/2050157912459505
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Barry Wellman
University of Toronto, Canada
Lee Rainie
Pew Internet & American Life Project, USA
Abstract
How did the absence of mobile phones affect the romantic life and death of
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet? The difference in their situation would have been
part of the social change to networked individualism from group-based societies.
The Mobile Revolution would have afforded personal communication rather than the
household-centered communication of the Montagues and the Capulets. Romeo and
Juliet would have been always available to each other, instead of wondering where
the other might be. Location-aware apps would have plotted their whereabouts. The
course of true love would have been more connected.
Keywords
family, internet, mobile phones, networked individualism, privacy, romance, social
networks, surveillance
Remember Juliet’s cry in the balcony scene, “Romeo, O Romeo, wherefore art thou
Romeo?” (II, 2, 33). It’s the precursor of networked individualism as Juliet wonders why
Romeo, a Montague, is moving beyond group boundaries to woo her, a Capulet.
Modern readers might understand Juliet’s cry as “where are you?” Both meanings sug-
gest how the Triple Revolution – the turn to social networks, the pervasive internet, and
the always accessible mobile phone – have changed the ways in which we connect with
each other. Nowadays, Juliet would routinely text or call Romeo via their mobile phones:
“What are your feelings about me?; Can you get away from your family?; When will you
be coming?” It’s not like the days when people called each other on their wired-in
Corresponding author:
Barry Wellman, University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Ave, Toronto, M6G 2R9, Canada
Email: wellman@chass.utoronto.caWellman and Rainie 167
(“landline”) phone at home or work – they knew exactly where those people were and had
a pretty good idea of the social and physical context in which they were operating.
In our Networked book (Rainie & Wellman, 2012), we have thought about how the
pervasive adoption of mobile phones – and more recently tablets and highly portable
laptop computers – has affected our lives. Among other things, the Mobile Revolution
has promoted networked individualism – connectivity that is not bound up in solidary
groups – and connectivity that paradoxically provides both location awareness (“where
are you?”) and facilitates communication without regard to location – I can connect with
you wherever you are. Although our focus has been on the United States and Canada, we
think our findings hold true for much of the developed world and increasingly large seg-
ments of the less-developed world. We argue that mobile phones have revolutionized
social affordances: technologies that provide possibilities and constraints for our lives.
You can take it with you
The most obvious affordance is that mobile phones are mobile. In the early days, that
meant 35-kilogram phones were so heavy that they had to be mounted in cars. Yet, even
one of those would have helped Brad and Janet in the Rocky Horror Picture Show escape
from the aliens when their car got stranded (O’Brien and Sharman, 1975). Of course,
phones have slimmed down: at first to 1- kilogram, unreliable, analogue bricks that
required holsters or bulging purses, and now to small, sleek easily pocketable digital
units weighing only 140 grams – a decrease of 99% from the original car phones. They
would easily fit into bodices and codpieces. Indeed, Leopoldina Fortunati (2003), Romeo
and Juliet’s Verona neighbor, notes that the mobile phone is now our third skin. The
number of U.S. mobile subscriptions has grown from 340,000 in 1985 to more than 302
million in 2011, comprising 83% of the adult population and 75% of teenagers (Rainie
and Wellman, 2012).
While the internet made communication personal and less constrained by distance,
it has been bound to physical locations, be it the house, office, or coffee shop. Having
their own mobile phones – along with tablets and notebooks – would have allowed
Romeo and Juliet to move around, liberated from locale and family surveillance. They
would have been less worried about their families when they were figuring out where
to meet. At the same time, their parents would have felt reassured because they could
call their children and ask where they were and what they were doing. But, would
Romeo and Juliet have told the truth? A location-aware app would also have been use-
ful for parents in tracking them. Or their parents might have prowled friends’ Facebook
updates or photo albums for clues.
One phone to rule them all
Today, Romeo and Juliet could connect with each other because mobility means acces-
sibility and availability. They’d be on each other’s top-five speed dial. And they would
probably have had a location-aware app that showed exactly where each other was: no
wandering the streets of Verona looking for each other. Rather than using separate phones
at home and at work – not to mention payphones at gas stations and on the street, people168 Mobile Media & Communication 1(1)
carry one phone that integrates all of their roles. Mobile phones have become versatile
accessories that are always at hand with many thousands of apps to communicate,
identify bird songs, and locate secret trysting spots: “tryst.com” actually exists. Indeed,
many young adults sleep with their mobiles near them, either on their beds or on their
night tables: “I don’t want to miss a text; it’s my alarm clock.” If Romeo or Juliet had a
voice-recognition app such as Siri, it might have echoed Ruth’s words to Naomi (1:16):
“Whither thou goest, I will go.”
For a while, the constant availability of mobile users meant that they annoyed others
with ringing phones in public. In 1992, co-author Wellman was startled when a Hong
Kong concert audience was asked to turn off its mobile phones: he hadn’t thought about
such issues back then. By 2003, he sympathized when concert pianist Andrea Schiff
stormed off the stage in Rome after a mobile phone rang twice in the audience.
Nowadays, accessibility has become more silent. As phones increasingly vibrate rather
than ring, people exchange text messages rather than talk. The percentage of texters in
the adult population has nearly doubled from 31% in spring 2006 to 59% in spring 2011
(Rainie and Wellman, 2012). Public spaces have become more silent, as people concen-
trate on their text messages, while downwardly peering texters have limited eye
contact.
Constant availability can be annoying in other ways. People can be contacted by
unwanted others. Imagine Romeo making plans to meet Juliet in the park, but his father
calls to say that he has to come home immediately. At least, the mobile connection would
have allowed Romeo to alert Juliet to his role conflict and possible absence. Or they
might suffer social overload as they feel normative pressure to remain connected when
they’d prefer not to be: if Juliet had kept insecurely texting Romeo, she might have
driven him away.
The personalization of communication
Romeo and Juliet’s exchanges would have been personal, a revolutionary change from
landline telephone communication that came into the entire household. As long as they
talked or texted in private, neither the Montagues nor the Capulets would know – unless,
of course, they snuck peeks at the list of previous calls and texts on the phones. Instead
of a phone ringing in a home – where all would hear it and possibly become part of the
conversation – internet communication and mobile communication are usually exchanges
between two individuals. Juliet could ask privately “wherefore art thou?” about Romeo’s
state of mind as well as his location.
By contrast, in the not-so-olden days, when someone called the household, all
family members could gather around the speakerphone or pick up extensions around
the house. But the increasing absence of home landline phones means that when
modern Juliets call home they reach only the one family member whose mobile
phone they are calling. Thus, the absence of landlines hinders conversations with the
entire household.
This dance of the personal and the household happens in real life, as many teens will
tell you. For example, some Arab Israeli young men give mobile phones to the women
they are dating. But the men get the bill. “Use the phone only in your own room, and putWellman and Rainie 169
it on silent vibrate when I call at 10PM. And don’t call anyone else, because I can see it
when I get the bill” (Hijazi-Omari & Ribak, 2008).
The networked family
The shift from household phones to personal mobile phones is part of the shift away from
solidary families to networked families (Kennedy & Wellman, 2007; Rainie, Wellman,
& Kennedy, 2012). Homes were refuges for Romeo and Juliet – and their families. There
were strong boundaries between households and the public, problematic streets. As late
as the 1960s, mothers would stay home while fathers would go off to work.
Homes now have permeable boundaries. Mom as well as Dad usually goes off to
work, and each family member has a separate agenda. There is more need to use their
mobile phones to communicate and coordinate the mundane aspects of life: Who will
pick up the kids from soccer practice? If they cannot get their employers’ permission to
phone or text each other at work, they’ll use their lunch and bathroom breaks.
Mobile contact has become multigenerational, as teens – and even children – are
increasingly getting their own mobile phones. This affords people of all ages opportu-
nities to become more autonomous agents. Many parents lend their young children
mobile phones or tablets to use as pacifiers. In this way, children learn digital skills
before they go to school, playing Angry Birds or Angelina Ballerina. The big step is
personal possession. In 2009, most Canadian children had their own mobile phones by
the age of 13; it undoubtedly is lower now (Wellman, Garofalo, & Garofalo 2009). As
they grew up, Romeo and Juliet had gotten past their childhoods of being household
and neighborhood bound. They made contact by encounters in public places. Teens
still do that – the shopping mall is the new agora – but their mobile phones also afford
continuous contact with their homes and distant friends.
Networked individuals interconnect mobile, internet
and in-person
Some pundits fear that mobile users rarely look up to engage with each other in person
(Turkle, 2011). If they are right, Romeo and Juliet might never look up from their mobile
phones to see each other. Or, would the course of true love have led them away from their
screens and into each other’s arms?
Yet, such fears are not based on systematic evidence. Instead, research shows that
mobile phones – and the internet, for that matter – are integrated into people’s face-to-
face interactions (Hampton, Sessions, Her, & Rainie, 2009; Wang and Wellman, 2010;
Rainie, Horrigan, Wellman, & Boase, 2006; Rainie and Wellman, 2012).
It is not as if there are separate realms of online and in-person contact. Rather, we are
networked individuals, and our personal networks integrate the internet, phones, and
in-person encounters. People intertwine mobile, internet, and in-person contact in a
seamless whole.
For example, Rhonda McEwen’s study of how university students use mobile phones
nicely shows the intricate dance that the internet, mobile phones, and in-person contact
make. Students first set up get-togethers on the internet. Then, as they get close to the time170 Mobile Media & Communication 1(1)
and place of meeting, they phone or text each other: “I’m a little late.” “Which corner are
you standing at?” The get-togethers are, of course, in person, but afterwards there are
almost immediate follow-up calls and texts: what the French call “L’esprit de l’escalier” –
the “spirit of the staircase” — when afterthoughts come to mind. If it was a group gather-
ing, emails and Facebook posts provide collective reinforcement (McEwen & Fritz, 2010).
From group to network
The story of Romeo and Juliet is the story of two individuals escaping the boundaries of
their densely knit groups. It is a story of the social network revolution that began well
before Facebook: the move from group-bound societies to networked individuals.
This turn to networked individualism has transformed communication from being
place-based to person-based.
Mobile phones have played a key role in the developed world’s transformation from
group-bound societies to networked societies in which people move among sparsely knit
networks of diverse others. Consider the mutually exclusive groups of Montagues and
Capulets. Nowadays, people have partial memberships in multiple clusters of ties
(Castells, 2000; Rainie and Wellman, 2012). And when trouble develops, they use their
mobile phones to call for help from whatever networks seem most appropriate. Smart
networked mobs form through viral word-of-mouth communication by mobile phone and
the internet, as well as via traditional in-person contact (Lane, 2011; Rheingold, 2002).
Thus, in little more than a decade, mobile phones have become the concrete instantia-
tion of the turn away from groups to networked individualism. Romeo and Juliet would
have used them – and loved them almost as much as they loved each other. With their
mobile phones, the course of their true love would have been more connected – and
perhaps would have run more smoothly. If only Romeo and Juliet had had mobile phones,
they might have lived happily ever after.
Funding
Although no grants directly supported this research, it is based on prior research supported by the
Pew Internet and American Life Project, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada, the Intel Corporation, and the Dynamic Infrastructures project of the GRAND Network of
Centres of Excellence. Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman’s book, Networked: The New Social
Operating System, provides more detailed argumentation, documentation, and exemplification.
Adam Babcock, Christian Beermann, Isabella Chiu, Chang Zeh Lin, Jeffrey Lane, Lilia Smale,
Beverly Wellman, and an anonymous referee provided good advice.
References
Castells, M. (2000). The rise of the network society. Second edition. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Fortunati, L. (2003). Front stage/back stage: Mobile communication and the renegotiation of
the social sphere. In L. Fortunati, J. Katz, & R. Riccini (Eds.), Mediating the human body:
Technology, communication, and fashion (pp.1–16). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Hampton, K.N., Sessions, L.F., Her, E.J., & Rainie, L. (2009). Social isolation and new
technology. Pew Internet & American Life Project: Washington. http://www.pewinternet.org/
Reports/2009/18--Social-Isolation-and-New-Technology.aspx.Wellman and Rainie 171
Hijazi-Omari, H., & Ribak, R. (2008). Playing with fire: On the domestication of the mobile phone
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Kennedy, T., & Wellman, B. (2007). The networked household. Information, Communication and
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Author biographies
Barry Wellman directs the NetLab at the University of Toronto. The co-author of Networked: The
new social operating system, he studies how networked individuals work, play and communicate
on and off line.
Lee Rainie is Director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, a “fact tank”
that studies the social impact of digital technologies. He is co-author of Networked: The new social
operating system.You can also read
