This blog post is Part 3 in what has just become a three part series dealing with CouchSurfing. Check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you are unfamiliar with CouchSurfing or at all curious about its social significance.

Articles like this one frustrate me, because they consider intergenerational shifts in etiquette as failings on the part of younger people.  In fact, Marc Bauerlein seems to ignore the fact that etiquette does change over time. He starts off by telling us some statistics about the ways in which young people communicate:
"In September 2008, when Nielsen Mobile announced that teenagers with cellphones each sent and received, on average, 1,742 text messages a month, the number sounded high, but just a few months later Nielsen raised the tally to 2,272. A year earlier, the National School Boards Association estimated that middle- and high-school students devoted an average of nine hours to social networking each week."

Assuming this is significantly higher in 2010, why is this a problem for Bauerlein?  He tells us, "They read comments on Facebook, but they don't "read" each others' posture, hand gestures, eye movements, shifts in personal space and other nonverbal—and expressive—behaviors. Back in 1959, anthropologist Edward T. Hall labeled these expressive human attributes "the Silent Language." [...] He argued that body language, facial expressions and stock mannerisms function "in juxtaposition to words," imparting feelings, attitudes, reactions and judgments in a different register. This is why, Hall explained, U.S. diplomats could enter a foreign country fully competent in the native language and yet still flounder from one miscommunication to another, having failed to decode the manners, gestures and subtle protocols that go along with words."

There are two primary problems I perceive with this:

1) Twenty-somethings have learned to talk about non-verbal cues - social networks like CouchSurfing give us the chance to dissect "the manners, gestures, and subtle protocols that go along with words"

2) Social cues shift over time, as communication styles change and technologies appear that provide new ways of communicating.

As regards my first claim, I recognize that non-verbal cues still play a major role in face-to-face interactions, but there is a willingness to discuss the significance of social cues that seems to spring from post-modern self-reflexiveness (we love analyzing ourselves and others), as well as the reduced nature of face-to-face exposure.  CouchSurfing is particularly useful and vital in places where social customs and etiquettes are dramatically different from the ones we know.

In early May, I spent a week in Morocco with a female friend. I've lived my whole life in two large Canadian cities, so while I am familiar with Muslim customs, I was totally illiterate in the "silent language" of Morocco. Meeting up with an American who had lived in Fes for several years gave me a chance to ask the questions that guidebooks didn't, and observation couldn't. Was our attire socially acceptable, even if we were being hassled? If we took a grand taxi (shared 6-person taxi), where should we sit?  Who were we supposed to be friendly to, and who did we have to ignore? What was an appropriate gift for our hosts in a small village? Would leaving food on the plate offend our hosts?

He graciously answered our questions, giving explanations, history, and context for things we might not have understood otherwise. There was also a CouchSurfing group called "For Girls Traveling to Morocco" which offered a forum for people to publicly ask those sorts of questions and be answered by other travelers.

As the world changes, taboos and etiquette do too. Fifty years ago it might not have been acceptable to answer the phone during dinner, and now it is common practice (between young people at least) to keep the cell phone on the table at the coffee shop, to avoid missing any texts or calls that should happen to come in. Of course, there are situations where texting is inappropriate: classrooms, meetings, etc., but it is inappropriate in the same way that passing notes is inappropriate.  On the whole, yes, face-to-face interactions are less frequent than in prior years, but that doesn't mean that people are incapable of communicating non-verbally. It is important to recognize that social cues are flexible too, and that "silent language" may no longer be so silent.