For All to Hear

Near the beginning of the end of Seinfeld, a two-part finale that laid bare all the self-absorbed preoccupations and anti-social behaviours of the four main characters, Elaine pulls a phone out of her purse to call her friend Jill, whose father is in the hospital. “What?” Elaine says on the sidewalk. “Ugh, I can’t hear you so good. There’s a lot of static.” She promises to call Jill back and hangs up. “Faux pas,” Jerry says to Elaine about her phone etiquette. “It’s like saying I don’t want to take up any of my important time in my home, so I’ll just get it out of the way on the street.” George piles on: “The street cellphone call is the lowest phone call you can make.”

Between them, Jerry and George accuse Elaine of being “selfish,” “dismissive,” and “pompous” before she finally walks away. I can only imagine what they would have said to her had she been trying to reach Jill on speakerphone.

That final episode aired on May 14, 1998, just three months after Nortel introduced the first mobile handset with an integrated speakerphone, a skunkworks project known as the Nortel One. Eighty units were manufactured in time for that year’s GSM World Congress, held in Cannes. Most tech types gathering on the French Riviera would have had cellphones already, but back in Canada just about 20 percent of households did. And if those households were anything like mine, the handheld devices were for “emergencies only.”

For many blissful years, mobile speakerphone technology flew under the radar, but that’s no longer the case — when some 95 percent of Canadian adults own smartphones and far too many are using them in ways that Jerry, George, Kramer, and surely even Elaine would consider selfish, dismissive, and pompous. As The New Yorker, CBC Radio, and countless other outlets are observing, public spaces — from the local market to the city bus, from the curbside to the jet bridge — are under assault. We are all being subjected to the TikTok algorithms, the sports highlights, and especially the inane conversations of perfect strangers being broadcast at full volume on tinny hardware.

The erosion of cellphone etiquette is part of a larger shift in cultural norms accelerated by the COVID‑19 pandemic, when many of us lost regular social contact with others and became even more atomized than we already were. It’s as if some people forgot how to behave in public and others never learned. Then there are those who simply do not care. All the while, data plans have increased in gigabytes and dropped in dollars. There’s no monetary reason to be stingy with one’s reels or FaceTime, even on the subway, where connectivity improves by the week.

Erik Piepenburg observed much of this two years ago in the New York Times, where he pointed out that speakerphone usage can grate on the average Joe’s nerves differently than boom boxes did in the 1980s. (For one thing, dozens at a time weren’t playing their conflicting soundtracks in the waiting room of a dentist’s office back then.) But despite the chattering trains and cacophonous cafés, Piepenburg believed the social contract of yesterday was holding in at least one place: the Great White Way. He asked Cristina Bicchieri, a professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, why that might be. “In a theater, you pay for the fruition of something, and somebody would be impinging on that,” she explained. I wish that were still the case.

Recently I found myself on Broadway, captivated by Laurie Metcalf’s Tony-winning performance as Linda Loman in the latest revival of Death of a Salesman. It was well into the second act, right when Linda takes her sons, Biff and Happy, to task for abandoning their ailing father at a would‑be celebratory dinner in the city. “You’re a pair of animals!” she yells at them. “Not one, not another living soul would have had the cruelty to walk out on that man in a restaurant!”

This is the point in Arthur Miller’s classic when grown men, who perhaps remember how they once treated their own fathers, begin to weep. It is also when another cruel soul, sitting two rows behind me in a sold-out theatre of 1,600, began using her iPhone as if it were a CB radio. Young and old alike tried to shush her, and our aisle’s usher jumped into heroic action. Yet the spell Metcalf had cast was broken; we were no longer in the Loman kitchen of the late 1940s but back in the reality of rudeness. The worst part was that the woman, who looked to be about my age and should have known better, was verbally offended at our collective offence.

I don’t know that we have to go as far as France, where the mobile speakerphone was launched but where “headphone dodgers” are now subject to fines. We should remember, though, what Jerry said years ago and do what we can through our own actions to help silence one of the great faux pas of modern life.