Quiet Riot

“I don’t want the person in the seat next to me yapping at thirty-five thousand feet any more than anyone else,” the Federal Communications Commission Chairman, Tom Wheeler, told Congress on Thursday. “But we are not the Federal Courtesy Commission.” With that rhetorical flourish, the F.C.C. voted to collect public comments on a proposal to lift a ban on in-flight cell-phone use.

If the immediate response was any indication, the F.C.C. needs a big, well-fortified comment box. “No! No! This will cause mayhem in the cabin,” one person tweeted. “Flight attendants cannot break up fights. Passengers will be endangered,” predicted another. A poll published a day before the decision found that forty-eight per cent of Americans opposed letting cell phones be used for calls in the air, while only nineteen per cent supported it and thirty per cent were neutral. Among people who had taken four or more flights, the opposition was stronger: seventy-eight per cent said no to cell-phone calls.

Over the years, Americans have been feeling more threatened, not less, by the government’s role in their lives. In a January survey, fifty-three per cent of people told Pew that the federal government threatens their personal rights and freedoms, up from forty-five per cent in October of 2003 and thirty-six per cent in May of 1995. When New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg started enforcing a ban on cell phones in schools, in 2006, students weren’t the only ones who revolted; parents did, too, anxious over not being able to reach their children. And yet now there’s furor over the F.C.C.’s decision to regulate one part of our lives a little less.

But that is simply because this is an encroachment that we happen to like. The cell-phone ban—which keeps our neighbors quieter than they would otherwise be—helps maintain the illusion that by buying a seat on an airplane, you have bought a small, private section of a very public space.

In a 1979 paper on airplane passengers, a sociologist named Louis A. Zurcher came up with a name for strangers shoved into the same small space: “encapsulated groups.” These were “collectives of individuals who voluntarily or involuntary share physical but not necessarily social closeness for the purpose of attaining some goal or reaching some destination.” These groups were a feature of contemporary urban society, with its imperative to move people efficiently from one place to another. They included buses, trains, subways, elevators, escalators, and even city streets.

But airplane passengers, Zurcher wrote, “seem to represent intensely the encapsulated group.” Together for hours and in especially tight quarters, individuals must find ways to preserve their “self-integrity.” One of those ways, it seems, is a social compact in which we all agree to stay relatively quiet.

In 2007, Scott W. Campbell, a communications professor at the University of Michigan, surveyed people in the U.S. mainland, Hawaii, Japan, Taiwan, and Sweden, about their tolerance for hearing people talking on cell phones in various settings: movie theatres, restaurants, buses, grocery stores, classrooms, and the sidewalk. On a scale of one to five, people gave the lowest tolerance scores to cell-phone conversations in places where everyone was participating in the same activity: movie theatres (1.55) and classrooms (1.77). They were most tolerant of phone conversations in places were people shared a space but were participating in different activities: grocery stores (3.69) and sidewalks (3.83). Campbell didn’t ask about airplanes, but they would seem to fall somewhere in the middle, near restaurants (2.57) and buses (3.30).

There is some consolation, in all of this, for those upset by the F.C.C. decision: there’s a good chance it won’t translate into a cell-phone free-for-all on planes anyway. First of all, the F.C.C. hasn’t lifted the ban yet—it is only taking comments on a proposal to do so, and the commission appears more interested in letting people use their phones to access data than for calls.

Plus, the public outrage has prompted the Department of Transportation to promise that it will consider banning cell-phone calls itself. After all that, even if cell phones are legally allowed on planes, airlines must also allow them and install the technology that lets airplanes at thirty thousand feet communicate with cell-phone towers down on the ground.

There’s another aspect of the phones-on-planes debate that hasn’t gotten as much attention, meanwhile: over the years, our interest in cell phones as calling devices—as opposed to little machines for texting, gaming, and Web-surfing—has languished. According to C.T.I.A., a trade group, people in the United States talked on cell phones for 2.3 trillion minutes in the year ending in June, 2012, up only slightly from 2.2 trillion in June, 2008. (By contrast, the number of text messages rose from about six hundred billion to 2.3 trillion over that period.) And the typical length of a call is just a couple of minutes.

The takeaway, it seems, is this: not only do we hate listening to other people’s endless conversations—we don’t particularly like long phone calls of our own. If people avoid calls on planes in the future, it may be the result of something more potent than a ban: our preference, as consumers of cell phones and airplane seats, to be left alone.

Photograph by Matt Slocum/AP.