CRD701: History and Theory of Communication Technology

While Shelley and Urr provide a fairly stout theoretical framework from which to address speed and mobility, and while Wood's discussion of surveillance and differential mobilities could likely keep us blogging until we reach a stage of digital exhaustion, both received more than thoroughly critical examinations in this week's posts. On top of--and perhaps more importantly than--that, I felt more connected to Jensen and Kellerman this week, so as goes the connection, so goes the focus of my analysis.

It occurred to me that I've experienced Jensen in context, reading her(?) article on my Amazon Kindle while on the #11c CAT bus to campus. Consociates have always been able to isolate themselves from their passengers with newspapers or other reading materials, but the Kindle and it's compact but always shifting interface allows me to continue ignoring others around me long after finishing a single article. Thanks to its wireless technology, I'm granted the extended mobility of downloading something else, ensuring that my facework exudes a "keep moving, no conversation here" front stage through my continuous downward gaze at the ever-connected interface of my e-reader.

This concept is certainly interrelated to Prato and Trivero's work (1985), which Kellerman calls upon to construct this idea of the nomad in the modern era: though I cannot physically carry all of my possessions with me as I travel to and from campus, my "personal library of documents and Internet information" is readily accessible through my Kindle, thus bridging the traditional separation between "being and home" and further allowing me to ignore my consociates. To go out on a bit of a limb: as mobile digital nomads, then, we might be defined by our ability to carry our information but not our belongings; thus, in stark contrast to the outward appearances we construct from our accumulation of things in our personal-lives-as-database (e.g., the clothes we wear, the books we stack on our shelves, the narcissitic/fetishistic automobiles we drive (Prato and Trivero again, p. 76), do 'digital nomads' develop interpersonal ethos from the information they carry? (Shelley and Urr might be quick to point out the implications suggested by such a question, as they introduce critical feminist theorist to the nomad theory). I tend to think so, especially if we continue on with the "nomadic worker" and "office on the run" concepts raised by various authors in Kellerman: do any of us anchor ourselves to a particular physical place when we read these articles every week, or even when we create these blog posts? I'm curious to know this, and to further know if any of you could picture yourselves regressing to a fixed working location without the mobility of modern communication technologies? Are we really that defined by our information?

At the least, we seem to be consumed with consuming it. Kellerman observes that "the use of either mobile phones or wireless Internet connection implies a blurring between the private and the public" (p. 101). For direct evidence of this, walk across campus or through a computer lab and witness how students (undergrads in particular) push their private lives into the public sphere through inane phone chatter and obsessive facebook updates, thus intruding on the privacy (and solitude, and sanity) of all others in the immediate area. It's an odd phenomenon: we travel through corporeal space, a space that abounds with more than enough opportunities to make human contact in person, yet we employ mobile technologies to serve a contradictory two-fold purpose in which we intentionally isolate ourselves in order to seek virtual human communication. Put differently, we go out of our way to keep to ourselves, only to combat isolation by reaching out to others through advanced mobile technologies. Wha?!?

In the U.S. at least, for a country so mobile, we're awfully out of shape.


Alternative Titles to this Blog Post:

• Why Jensen's Re-reading of Goffman & Simmel will Make Us All Mobile Misanthropes


• What Would Kellerman Change to his Automobility Sections in Light of $150/barrel oil?


• Isolationism, the Comeback Kid: Somewhere, President Monroe Voices His Approval from the Grave


• Trying to Account for Our Apparent Desire for Constant Co-location...and Leaving it Incomplete