RO ON SHARED SPACE – 1

THE GREAT SPACE ROBBERY

At the ACE Hotel New York on 29th between Fifth and Broadway, it’s a strange play between personal space and shared space. The role of public space, it seems, is to heighten the perception of private space and its relationship with itself.

You walk in, pick up your wifi code and dive into your laptop, amidst the hustle-bustle of wait staff, the clinking of cappuccino cups and inventive cocktails. Like those cocktails, it’s a blend of cool vibe and a Friday-happy-hour feel. No one needs to approve of your presence – you simply belong.

Unless of course you do something weird – as I did.

There are four marked areas in the hotel lobby. Two of them are filled with sprawling couches generous enough to accommodate these people, and all of their workday’s accouterments, which, in the winter, have a tendency to take up more than one’s fair share of individual space – bulky winter coats, backpacks, gloves, hats, earmuffs… you get the picture. A communal table for ten laptops stands at the center, at which people sit, each engrossed in an intense relationship with their laptop. The relationship is quite obvious – that of one with oneself.

Respect for personal space – particularly here – is an unspoken tenet. And so I decide to throw a little wrench into the snugness of this secure digital haven, if only to find the answer to the social experiment that ensues. I steal a furtive glance at my neighbor’s screen, which I ensure she catches from the periphery of her vision. And then, from the periphery of mine, I observe. She’s completely disconcerted, and she loses focus on what she’s doing. Her only thought is my “sneak peek”. So now, it’s her turn to looking surreptitiously towards me, by which time, my gaze has calmly returned to my own laptop, and to writing this piece. Clearly, I have turned into a bull, which has subtly but substantially butted into the fragility of the surrounding china-like psyche.

When personal space is ruptured with a sneaky, stealthy glance such as this (which you can’t prove for sure) it can become extremely potent just by its sheer questionability. Did it really happen? Did I imagine it? Am I being paranoid? Do I now angle my laptop a few degrees away? Or will that seem awfully rude? Should I then actually turn my laptop towards her, so what I’m thinking isn’t obvious? An avalanche of doubts cascades into the mind and from it, becoming a distraction of immense proportion.

When invisible boundaries in shared space are so ruptured, it’s more than just an invasion, it’s a theft – of privacy, comfort and security.

In that light, it is not likely that my “guinea pig” at the neighboring laptop will ever be the same again.

Tch, tch.