— 6 May 2004
Slobs and Cell Phones
On a recent trip to Tokyo I was struck by the careful attention paid to impression management by many of the city’s residents. Everywhere I looked it was Italian suits and designer purses (granted I spent most of my time in Shibuya). Well, not everywhere but the clothing, gestures, use of space, and communication employed by the people I encountered revealed the contours of “everyday” self-presentation precisely because it seemed strange to me. When you think about it, compared to the rest of the world (even discounting similar, relative income levels), Americans are slobs.
I mean that in the nicest way and certainly include myself in that category. By “slob” I really mean that the parameters of self-expression involved in impression management are different and to some extent less agreed upon than here in the United States.
Impression management is a sociological/anthropological theory based on the idea that selfhood and identity are performative acts that we continually engage in frequently without realizing it. The tools at hand include the human body, especially the face and hands, as well as clothing and other objects. In 1959, the sociologist Erving Goffman published “The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life” exploring how we use these things in the course of daily interactions. In addition to the ordinary situations of everyday life, Goffman also examined unusual situations such as prisons and asylums, what he called “total institutions,” using these to show how individuals used various means (many unauthorized) to maintain their sense of selfhood – to simultaneously communicate and construct their identity.
The attention to detail of appearance/identity in Japan really hit home through one remarkable instance: I saw a young man on the subway platform holding a small object out in front of him and running his fingers through his hair in order to achieve just the right balance of controlled messiness. What I thought was a mirror turn out to be his cell phone. He was using his camera phone as vanity mirror. The very public nature of this grooming (a rush hour subway station) was also in itself a performance that lasted several minutes involving hair that hard seemed out of place. While so-called vanity phones represent only a small percentage of the cell phones currently manufactured, the notion of a cell phone doubling as a compact mirror dovetails nicely in a culture where performance of self is so carefully choreographed. Maybe we could use some of these in the US.
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