NEWS ARTICLE

If Romeo and Juliet

Had Cell Phones
Misty Harris

About the Author

Misty Harris has written for Canada’s top newspapers SCAN FOR
MULTIMEDIA
for more than a decade. She has received national
recognition and has appeared as a pop culture
commentator on television programs. Harris has written
stories about social science, consumer trends,
demographics, academic studies, and marketing.

BACKGROUND
With the development of new technologies and new social norms,
sociologists work to not only explain the social order of the past but
also to discuss how society has changed and evolved over time. In
this selection, the author uses the play Romeo and Juliet to compare NOTES

historical and modern social order.

R omeo and Juliet is often cited as a tragedy that could have

been averted with one cellphone call. But smug as we are in
our technology, a Canadian sociologist says the Shakespearean
tale was actually ahead of its time, with the star-crossed lovers’
romance acting as an allegory for the social network revolution.
2 In a new research paper, Barry Wellman points to Romeo and
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Juliet as one of the earliest examples of the shift from group-bound

societies to networked individuals—a modern phenomenon that,
with the saturation of mobile phones, has reinvented the way
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people interact.
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3 “The big thing about the social network revolution is that

instead of living in tightly knit groups, people are crossing
boundaries and connecting as individuals—and that’s basically
the story of Romeo and Juliet,” said Wellman, professor of
sociology and information at the University of Toronto.

UNIT 4 Independent Learning • If Romeo and Juliet Had Cell Phones IL30
 4 “The problem with being ahead of your time, of course, is that
NOTES technology needs to catch up.
5 Wellman’s paper, published in the January issue of the journal
Mobile Media & Communication, looks at the probable ways in
which the couple’s love story would’ve changed had they had
access to today’s tools—an exercise that simultaneously sheds
light on mobile devices’ effect on modern life.
6 “The big problems were that they couldn’t coordinate with
each other, they couldn’t find each other, and they had a lot of
miscommunication about each other,” said Wellman, co-author of
Networked: The New Social Operating System. “Today, they would
literally have each other in their pockets all the time. I know
students who send one another secret (cellphone) vibrations just
to let the other person know, ‘I’m thinking of you.’”
7 Such micro-communication is enabled by the slim-down of
mobile phones, from roughly 1 kilogram to about 140 grams1
(“they would easily fit into bodices and codpieces,”2 Wellman
observes).
8 Empowered by this technology, Romeo and Juliet likely
would’ve used location-based apps to track each other’s
whereabouts, text-messaging to keep their communication
private, and video chats to keep the spark alive.
9 In addition, Wellman speculates that their exchanges would’ve
been subject to less scrutiny, as mobile phones eliminate the need
to connect through a family gatekeeper.
10 “In the past, everyone in the house would know when you got
a phone call. Now, you can do this stuff more or less in private,”
said Wellman, who adds that this shift is also evident in the ways
people use their cellphones.
11 “If you were riding on public transit 10 years ago, you’d hear
people shouting at each other on their mobile phones. Now,
they’re murmuring or they’re texting.”
12 In fact, Canadians send more than 274 million texts every
day. And if Juliet “had kept insecurely texting Romeo,”
Wellman believes the resulting social overload would have
driven him away.
13 The sociologist ultimately concludes that the consequences of
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technology for Verona’s lovers would be the same as they are for
modern society: mixed.
14 “They’d still be alive,” said Wellman. “But they probably
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would’ve gotten tired of each other really quickly.” ❧

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1. 1 kilogram to about 140 grams 2.2 pounds to about 0.3 pounds.

2. bodices and codpieces common parts of women’s and men’s clothing from
Shakespeare’s era.

IL31 UNIT 4 Independent Learning • If Romeo and Juliet Had Cell Phones