Re: [-empyre-] Distraction: Being Human in the Digital Age

[Henry Warwick <henry.warwick@sbcglobal.net>]

first off, I dispute the notion of the digital age - I
consider it a conceit of a specific strata of
contemporary civilisation, and once within that
strata, the notion loses meaning as it becomes
redundant.

Example: with the abandonment of analogue tape, all
video is digital, therefore, the notion of "digital
video" is largely meaningless. An age defined by media
and where all media is digital is redundant as the
notion of "digital age".

But this goes back a few months to our discussion of
(N) time. I don't want to go there right now, so:
 
> What might be useful to discuss is whether the
concept of 'space' is
> relevant to the notion of mobility. Perhaps what we
are dealing with 
is
> different ways of being within time.

Space is a feature of time and vice versa. Einstein.
Relativity and all that...

> Are mobile phones changing how we are
> to ourselves and to others? Do they influence our
sense of self? Is the
> mobility that is at the heart of the mobile phone
creating mobile, mulitple
> ?egos? or ?selves??   Who or what is the remote
?other??

As an occassional user of a mobile phone, I would say,
none of the above. It's just a telephone when and
where I need one. Discussions of telephony don't
really change much because of mobility. I would argue
that the more interesting change wrought by mobile
phones is ubiquity - telephony on demand. The
consequences of that are still very much up in the air
and of the moment. (Please excuse the conceptual puns)

The "space" opened by telephony was actually opened by
telegraphy some few decades prior to telephony and has
since the arrival of telephony has been expanded into
that funky interweb thingie.

Dot - Dash - Silence between... nearly binary... data:
moved from point to point + decades of technological
development = media as data. + Ubiquity?

That's interesting... Media saturation.

iTV announced by Apple: download movies through your
phone lines to wireless recievers. Shoot movies with
cellphones. The Network has its own demands and
abilities: cellphone video to blog, which is then
accessed by others phones. Push technologies could
call the targeted phones and automatically leaving
messages to access the video which is then networked
to your wireless TV system, etc. etc. etc. The
development possibilities are intense, especially with
the development of femto- and subfemto-second
switches. All operating within a high energy
consumption / heat output context of an electrical
civilisation that externalises the costs of a degraded
biosphere and dependent on unsustainable demographic
and economic systems of resource consumption.

Mythologies of self and other will vary over time and
differ within time: quality and perception. Ubiquity
is quantitative and creates its own qualities
regardless of perception.

uh- boss arrived - gotta go...

HW

"I've got a telegram in my hand
Works on paper - written in sand
But who needs a telegraph anyway?"
-OMD, Telegraph, Dazzle Ships, 1981