OK, I admit this is kind of about one of my pet hates.
I really can’t stand phone noise on public transport. It’s kind of my problem; I struggle with noise. If there’s a interrupting kind of noise from the overall ambience on a train, for example, I’ll instantly be unable to stop waiting for the moment where it inevitably interrupts again, leaving me in a state of inertia.
I might be my problem. But it’s certainly ‘a thing’ that is different to the 2000s when noise from phones and speakers on public transport was more deliberately anti-social.
2005 to 2010 was highpoint of what Owen Jones called ‘Chavs: the demonisation of the working class’ and ‘ASBOS’ (anti social behaviour orders), or at least the media focus on them.
It’s just my theory, but a large section of society who were viewed as trash, sometimes even human waste, in the decade following Thatcherism, sometimes responded with acts that were deliberately anti-social. To provoke, and unsettle the ‘European-style cafe and restaurant’ ambience that New Labour wanted to create in towns smashed by aggressive deindustrialisation. The playing of music on trains and buses was a kind of reflexive “fuck you; if you think I’m trash then I’ll show you trash”.
Fast forward through the age of violent austerity and the explosion of social media and smart phone culture, we kind of have the New Labour cafe/restaurant dream, albeit through the some Californian Dystopian lense of a divided society of lifestyle content creating humans and invisible humans, left behind. So much so that the ‘chavs’ of yesterday exist in smaller and smaller corners of public life.
The feels like a big jump, and probably is, to get to my point. But it kind of is a background story to the New Annoying Noises of public transport.
The amount of time I almost lose my rag and want to throw somebody’s phone on the floor… But these people (and they are many),aren’t doing it deliberately, to annoy me. They don’t seem to even realise. It’s like they don’t even recognise that they occupy space with others. When I overhear a 3 second audio of what I presume must be the same Tik Tok video, again and again, wondering when the torture will end, I realise that it’s the replacement for the old kind of anti social behaviour.
But there’s no intent, because to some extent they are disengaged from any kind of physical (flesh) space. It’s not people who are now anti social it’s more that the traumatic technological and social changes that have accelerated in the 2010s has arrived us in a place where the physical world is both too painful and inconvenient to be social within.
John B Ledger 