[-empyre-] RE: Mobile Media debate

[Marina Vishmidt <maviss@gmail.com>]

Hi all -

Just a few initial thoughts, trying to track back over the postings to 
this incredibly rich discussion! (and one which I confess has been 
supplemented by the [iDC] list discussion on 'internet of things' and 
mobile architectures - sorry if that filters through).  I'm coming in 
very late to the conversational stream, so any responses will 
necessarily be somewhat reductive as they are addressing an imaginary 
'digest' of what has been said thus far, but not addressing anyone's 
remarks in particular . . . Apologies in advance for the excessive 
length!  I don't expect anyone to read the whole thing . .

In general, I've been curious about the idea of the increasing mediation 
of social conflict/change by technology as symptomatic of certain more 
systematic socio-political tendencies linked to the balance of power 
between social actors eg the initiative for change has been in the court 
of corporations and government and/or military funded semi-private r&d 
agencies for so long, that the ideology of technology-led innovation is 
setting the terms of debate in the absence of any consideration of 
futures other than the one that the technologies both propagate and 
presuppose - the security-obsessed, 1st world, one of frictionless 
capitalism and monitoring of subject populations that pose any virtual 
or actual threat to business as usual, and the fact that this perpetual 
crisis management is itself business as usual and business would 
collapse in a truly frictionless field (as would anything - basic 
physics).  The horizon of social change as a different form of 
organisation of social and productive relations is out of the picture 
completely - or, it is understood as a byproduct of our 'tools'.  So the 
power of technologies to mould the social landscape is one of the main 
stories told by capitalism to itself to help it sleep at night - why are 
we repeating it instead of exacerbating the crisis that is plainly in 
evidence?

An example: there was a posting on the iDC list about New Songdo City, 
an island city in South Korea that would function as prototype 'smart' 
urban environment driven by rfid technology in the operation of its 
nfrastructure, municipal and commercial services (see 
http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2006-September/000725.html).  
Here we have an r&d theme park being promoted as some sort of tenable 
propoisition of how we'll live in the future - this is nothing new of 
course ("past futures"), in fact is symptomatic of 20th century 
technological determinism of all stripes, hegemonic, subversive, 
capitalist, communist, modernist, totalitarian - is even endearingly 
retro in a way - but it reiterates a populist-media narrative of how 
profit-led innovation and investment is currently the only driver for 
social change, which actually means it is not a question of 
retro-futurity at all.  It is the opposite: an elimination of all 
futures, to be supplanted by a timeless and normalised/normative crisis 
of accumulation, conflict, and the short-circuiting/management of its 
dysfunctions by technological/military/carceral means.  The only 
difference between one time and another is in the optimisation of these 
processes - the'design' approach.  (as a detour, I wonder if we can 
think about some of the literature on the 'experiential city' and the 
'experience economy' as an interesting conflation of the notion of 
experience as a way of exceeding commodity relations in social life, but 
one which only makes sense precisely by being folded back into that 
commodity relation - 'experience' as the ultimate luxury good.  The 
'experiential city' is an interesting strand of thinking in regeneration 
discourse, where the subtext of not just a valorisation of experience 
per se, but a very strict calculation of who is eligible to have 
experiences and who isn't emerges most clearly.) Lest this be perceived 
as a totalising narrative geared towards pre-empting further discussion, 
my purpose in putting this forward is only to illustrate that so long as 
capitalism is the operative system of our social and economc 
relationships, the default setting for the circulation of any new 
technology will always be profit and control - and as Armin Medosch, in 
the article cited by Heather Corcoran notes, it is in a precise and 
sober assessment of the risks and potentialities, as well as the 
glitches and hyperbole, of any new technological modaility (RFIDs, in 
that text) that the default setting can be disrupted and repurposed.  
Otherwise, discussions about technological applications in media, or 
arts contexts, will always be the displacement of other discussions that 
aren't happening -- or the idealisation of 'non-art' contexts.

-re: the issue of public and private space in the use of mobile 
technologies the proliferation of identities ties in for me with the 
elaboration of the term' situated technologies' which is almost an 
indispensable corollary to the  notion of 'mobile technologies' - 
'mobile technologies' perhaps denoting the fact that we have a lot of 
technologies nowadays which are on the move and enable us to be in 
contact with some sort of techno/social/administrative network while 
ourselves on the move - and 'situated' seems like a good vector for an 
analysis of these moving targets, whose use will inevitably be just 
that, situated in particular lifeworlds and pragmatisms. Again, a 
materialist analysis seems useful here.  Disparities in wealth, 
education and life prospects are already enabling different degrees of 
separation from reality/optionality of reality - what such a reality may 
constitute, and for whom, along which lines of mediation.  Realities are 
already incommensurable for people in different social worlds - the use 
of mobile technologies is simply another aspect of lifestyle, lifestyles 
already inescapeably divergent, but with certain bases of commonality 
articulated in consumption.  To me the most fascinating question, maybe 
the only question at the moment is:  what does it mean that everyone has 
a mobile phone?  What does the normalisation of such a technology augur 
for the social relationships it mediates? It's like money that way, a 
total abstraction and concreteness at the same time.

-and again, back to the old hackneyed point (sorry) that technologies 
have no inherent properties that will vitiate the existing and 
developing dynamics of social experience as it is produced by 
unquantifiable range of factors, from relationship to means of 
production to cultural marketing and identification - as these social 
relations can head in more stratified or more contestational directions, 
technologies will enable or augment any of these tendencies but they 
will not lead, they cannot lead.  Analysing technologies by their 
intrinsic properties or as conducive to certain types of social 
experience is called commodity fetishism, eg. the conceptual switch 
whereby relations between people are transmuted into relations between 
things, and vice versa (things acquire social and spiritual 
properties).  Of course, it is important to recognise just how this 
process takes place, which is why the discussion about the 'internet of 
things' is so interesting - on the one hand it promotes a 
trans-valuation of the human/thing, object/subject categories via their 
relationality [albeit a relationality dependent on technological 
parameters] , but by not providing a genuine analysis of how social 
relations or the organisation of production may be modified (I for one 
am unconvinced by Sterling's claim that 'we' will become more 
environmentally responsible as a society because we can track every 
stage of the object's production and distirbution cycle) or how the 
current order may in fact be profoundly secured by technological change 
of the type it discusses, it inescapably confirms those very polarities. 
(I would here again refer people to this month's discussion on [iDC] for 
some intriguing reflections around this).

all best,
m