Week 3: Speed and Mobility Readings
When reading Kellerman's article on "Technologies" I was struck by the distinction of oedipal (non-autonomous) mobilities and narcissistic/fetishistic (autonomous) mobilities that he presents Prato and Trivero (1985) as making when talking about transportation. Although the idea of the automobile as "the avatar of mobility"(Thrift, 1996, p.272 qtd. Kellerman, 2001) did not surprise me, it was the reminder that "Paradoxically, people using personal mobilities of any type expressing autonomy of operations by users are much more vulnerable to surveillance than people using public mobility services, at least corporeal ones"(Kellerman, 2001,p.87) that left the greatest impression on me. In conjunction with the section on walking I started to think about autonomous mobilities and physical mobilities with control. In an absurdist sense, this reminded me of a George Saunders story called "My Flamboyant Grandson" in the book, In Persuasion Nation. In the story, Saunders presents a city where walking down the street screens download advertisements personally geared to your tastes and consumer habits. It is then your civic duty to pause (or walk slowly) to listen to the messages. Just to reinforce this habit, police will detain you if you try to walk quickly by the screens without listening. Since I am interested in working with audio culture/audio composition/media I began to wonder how audio repurposing of urban places might work as a kind of surveillance and how ipod use could function as a kind of personal audio mobility or audio autonomy. Already places like gas stations are using TV screens to provide auditory intrusion with news clips and commercials. If ipods provide a personal audio experience, even to the point of cancelling out/diminishing human communication, it would seem that rather than using a fantastical construction of urban screens, places would involve automatic download of sounds and images unto ipods or mobile phones. Maybe in the future of cell phones service is free, but location-specific sounds and images are transmitted intermittently. I might be getting on too dystopian a tangent, though. Another aspect of the Kellerman article which made me think about walking was the idea of speed in mobility. When talking about digital natives people talk about how they must always be connected, even walking from class to class, etc. However, maybe it isn't so much a need for connection as an attempt to double presence because walking is so slow compared to the automobility and internetness.
In Sheller and Urry's look at "The New Mobilities Paradigm," I thought it was interesting that they discussed the idea of power, gender, and elitism in issues of mobility and mobility studies, and that "Moving between places physically or virtually can be a source of status and power"(Shelley & Urry, 2006,p.213). However, having just been inside airports, I had to personally disagree that the discussion of a "Kinetic elite" in air travel involved an oversimplification. Yes, flight produces a sort of 'mobile power,' but I think that has little descriptive power of the situation of actually flying or spending 'placeless' time in airports. However, in light of the story of the husband coming home from fighting overseas and accidentally bringing home a spider so big it killed the family dog, I do think Sheller and Urry were making an understated point about the new paradigm of mobility also having to account for possibly harmful connections in time-space compression.
What was most interesting in Jensen's article, giving the more historical perspectives of Simmel and Goffman in terms of social space, interaction and mobility was the focus on encounters as involving acting or Goffman's dramaturgy metaphor. "To repeat: the individual does not go about merely going about his business. He goes about constrained to sustain a viable image of himself in the eyes of others"(Goffman, 1972,p. 185 qtd. Jensen, 2006,p.153). I thought this image of the social actor involved in mobility could also be applied to Kellerman's idea of virtual mobility. Certain interactions like text messages are abrupt, but when it comes to email or even instant messaging there is a certain protocol or netiquette involved in signing off or corresponding. Beyond just hoping that comp. students adopt a more formal, polite interaction in their virtual mobilities, it seems like there should be more study of how something like Goffman's street crossing theories could apply to virtual mobility/communication. For instance, are you less likely to write more hesitantly after the 4th email you've sent? Is there an analogous condition to the crowded street corner in cyberspace?
Finally, Wood and Graham deal not with the complexities of mobility or the sunny-side of connectedness, but with the real and often invisible injustice of software-sorting and boundaries that create differentiated mobilities. Here, in the example of the international airport travel that trusts and passes frequent travelers with biometric indicators on file, I can see the label of the kinetic elite. When I worked for the International Bridge, Tunnel, and Turnpike Association I had heard about lanes that would be designated high-occupancy/or taxed, effectively giving the elite access to uncongested mobility. However, even that the idea was entertained by grocery stores to change pricing to segregate socio-economic classes is horrifying. The Wood & Graham article definitely speaks to the Sheller & Urry piece in exposing the injustice and danger in social science not taking up a new paradigm of mobility and investigating the abuses that a control-society will be technologically capable of in relation to access and mobility.