[-empyre-] Mobile territory

[Simon Taylor <swht@clear.net.nz>]

There seems to be a tendency to limit discussion of mobile telephony to the
"main stories told by capitalism to itself to help it sleep at night"
(Marina Vishmidt), narratives which rely on the exclusion of events and
exceptions, even as they are told from different and often competing
viewpoints - against a background of paranoid fear regarding the potential
totalisations/globalisations of any one viewpoint. For instance,
privatisation itself is not a selfconsistent bloc: it is a danger in
specific cases - and ought to induce fear - but not a continuum.

(Forgive me, Aliette, I don't seek to misrepresent your argument, but am
simplifying and citing privatisation as an instant of a, if I may, milieu,
which includes the complicity of media art with privatised media.)

The prophylactic use of cells I see at night on Ponsonby Road is one answer
to a more general social anomie - the passive-aggressive quality in my home
city's psychogeography. I think there is an assumption in mapping mobile use
against the city - a mobility-mediatrics haunted by the circulation-city of
transportation and mass private ownership of cars - of the cell as
extending, in the extent of its use worldwide, only a particular city (New
Babylon, perhaps), which it organises according to a singular rule: a glocal
architecture. This assumed 'New Babylon' reflects "the minor narcissistic
alienation of the middle classes" (Brian Holmes), which can further be
qualified, and is so often as to make it appear an overcompensation, as
white and privileged.

Practices that use cells to ends and purposes for which they were not
intended - perhaps wrongly called detournements - whether 'artistic' or
engendered in corporate R&D and endorsed in boardrooms both serve equally to
give the lie to the notion of an utterly consistent planular field. They
offer some relief to the map, if not any resistance, by delineating,
defining areas of engagement and deployment, by deterritorialising and
reterritorialising. For example, the regadgetising of the cell, notably by
Nokia, as a webbrowser, an entrypoint to the net, points to the shortcomings
of the mobile in fulfilling its role as a communications device. Since,
given the continuing preference of face-to-face meetings among
businesspeople, the strategy at work here is to sell to the converted,
something new but not radically so - it is a lateral manoeuvre in the
deployment of market strategy, a tactic.

Where the cell is gaining predominance as the preferred communications
medium - I understand from the media! - is in territories which do not fit
the fully urban western white middleclass assumption, and often areas
lacking copperwire infrastructures. West Africa, for example, where the cell
is invaluable as a price-gauging tool for small businesses and primary
producers, for discovering relative prices at different marketplaces, so
finding out where it's best to sell. The competition for this 'market' is
not of serious strategic interest so there would seem to be practical
reasons for promoting connectivity via cell, indeed, its self-promotion as
practical.

Sorry to go on but one further point: the repackaging of the cellphone - its
provision with more media devices, and its gearing towards the net as
towards recording and playback - relies on the fetish status I alluded to in
an earlier post - so specifically in this regard, as a fetish, sites itself
fully within the set of endocolonial assumptions to which I've taken Marina
Vishmidt's "main stories..." as an index.

Yours
simon taylor