In the mobile culture one lives with the other foot permanently planted in the future, using the mobile to administer and manage his or her future meetings and affairs. Places and times are not planned in advance; rather people agree (or just understand without further mention) to call “when they get there.” This makes life less bound, since it is possible to arrange each day according to the events it brings about.
The mobile maintains a readiness for flexible meetings and for arranging them as befits the day. . . . The mobile blurs the previously organized everyday structure and shifts it to a more flexible direction. This brings about a change in our perception of time, so that the notion of a previously produced, organized future is replaced by a sliding sense of time which is constantly tilted towards the future. The future is no longer conceived as something consisting of exact moments as much as of approximate places-in-time which are open to negotiation according to the situation.30
Another characteristic of a changing sense of time that Mäenpää observed among Finnish youth was their use of texting to share experiences in real time, to go through parts of the day simultaneously exchanging their thoughts and observations with a small group of friends, each of whom was located in a different place. Sociologist Barry Wellman, extending his studies of online social networks to include users of mobile devices, concluded that the ability to be in immediate contact with one’s social network even if they are in different places, enables several broad kinds of social changes.31 When the social networking capabilities of the desk-bound Internet go mobile, according to Wellman,
The shift to a personalized, wireless world affords networked individualism, with each person switching between ties and networks. People remain connected, but as individuals rather than being rooted in the home bases of work unit and household. Individuals switch rapidly between their social networks. Each person separately operates his networks to obtain information, collaboration, orders, support, sociability, and a sense of belonging.32
According to Wellman, it is easier for individuals to connect with multiple social milieux, with limited involvement in each one, which in turn diminishes the control each milieu exercises over the individual and decreases its commitment to the individual’s welfare. People switch fluidly from network to network, using their communication media to contact the social network needed for each moment. This means that network capital—the ability to use the technological network to contact social networks and to make use of them to one’s benefit—becomes important in a mobile and pervasive world, along with financial capital and social capital. Those who know how to tap into smart mob social network capital will gain advantages. Those who know not, have not.
Smart mob technologies already seem to be changing some people’s sense of place as well as their experience of time, with visible effects on public spaces such as sidewalks, parks, squares, and markets, where more and more of the physically co-present population are communicating with people far away. Leopoldina Fortunati has conjectured that the many Italians now seen talking or texting with their mobiles have “stolen” communication from public to private spheres.33 Fortunati claims that by taking their attention back into the private sphere, Italians have devalued the unspoken rules regarding participation in public communication space.
Wellman shares Fortunati’s fear that the privatization of communications will lead to public spaces where “people pass each other unsmiling.”34 Haddon has noted that over half of those surveyed in Italy, the United Kingdom, and Germany had a negative reaction to the use of mobile phones in public, and other observers in Scandinavia noted similar reactions. Haddon attributes this social friction to the “way that mobile telephony disrupts the constructed spheres of privacy of others in those public spaces.”35 Fortunati believes that “the ambiguous dimension of presence/absence in space also means the restructuring of the sense of belonging to a place, one of the four classic poles of the sense of belonging (apart from belonging to the family, one’s country, and one’s race). It is actually transformed into the sense of belonging to one’s communicative network.”36 Fortunati’s conjecture echoed Mizuko Ito’s observation that Tokyo thumb tribes consider themselves “present” at a gathering if they are in touch via texting.
Now in its earliest stages, the “presence of those who are absent” is found by many to be a disturbing new development in a longer-term degeneration of civility in human communication. In Fortunati’s words:
How is it that artificial communication can have the better over natural communication? We can find an answer to this question. With the advent of the small screen, we had already shifted attention away from natural communication, fragmenting it with TV consumption. And so initially we learned to talk while we were watching TV at home; later, we learned to answer a call, brusquely interrupting an already ongoing conversation with somebody. That is, what we do in this case is divert attention from interpersonal communication in favour of a virtual conversation, over a distance. In the same way as we hushed our family members to be able to follow the TV program, in the same way in the case of the mobile, we make our flesh and blood interlocutor helpless while we talk into the mobile and give the person at the other end more importance than the person in front of us. So, it is the previous devaluation of natural communication that is the element that has implicitly permitted the emptying out of our presence in space, both as standers-by and as users of the mobile.37
One category of critique contends that electronic communication media have created an artificial world in which people spend most of their waking hours, a hyper-real amusement park of pixels, slogans, sitcoms, spam, and advertisements designed to maximize consumer spending and minimize resistance to consumption. In the 2000 edition of The Virtual Community, I discussed the “Frankfurt School” philosophers Adorno and Horkheimer who saw mass media as a weapon of psychological manipulation of the consumer by a culture industry that eats everything authentic, privatizes everything public, and feeds it back to people as pay-as-you-go fables.38 An even more extreme position was taken by Jean Baudrillard, whose descriptions of the “hyperreal” portray a world in which everyone is so mesmerized that they have forgotten that their environment is no longer real.39 Hyperreal media, Baudrillard proposed, are the ultimate refinement of capitalism, generating desire for consumption simply by manipulating the simulation of the moment. Selling people beliefs, hopes, and distractions generates profits at the same time it pacifies and neutralizes possible resistance from consumers. There are only a few necessities of life to turn into products, but an infinity of symbols, and a pacified population of symbol-consumers, in hyperreality.
It’s hard not to think of Baudrillard in Times Square or Shibuya Crossing, or driving through any suburb in the world at night, the curtains of every house lit by the blue glow of cathode tubes. I started using the word “disinfotainment” about ten years ago to describe the combination of increasingly spectacular media with the ownership and reshaping of journalism by entertainment interests.40 Who would deny that there is some degree of truth to this most cynical viewpoint, given the growing consolidation of mass media ownership, the capture of much of the Internet by large commercial interests that now move to enclose it, the trivialization of journalism by the entertainment companies that now own broadcasting networks and newspapers?41 Yet many-to-many media confer a power on consumers that mass media never did: the power to create, publish, broadcast, and debate their own point of view. Newspaper, radio, and television audiences were consumers, but Internet audiences were “users” with powers of their own. The most important question about this new wrinkle in power/knowledge is whether it sets the stage for counter-power that would surprise Adorno, Horkheimer, and Baudrillard, or whether it is yet another simulacrum, a simulation of counter-power that really doesn’t change who has all the chips.
Many-to-many media cannot survive if too many free riders take advantage of universal access to other people’s attention. Ironically, the democratization of publ
ishing power afforded by many-to-many networks could spell the death of social cyberspace through a form of informational littering. When i-mode users were hit by “mobile spam” sent to their telephones by computerized autodialers, DoCoMo paid out a staggering $217 million in refunds.42 The lack of a “shadow of the future” creates a vulnerability for hit-and-run artists. At least the big global disinformation factories have an incentive to maintain a relationship with their customers. Spam, a classic tragedy of the commons problem, wastes every Internet user’s time and attention. People who care more about their personal gain than the value of the network or other people’s time broadcast commercial solicitations, many of them indecent, to hundreds of millions of people at a time. Spam is growing because the selfish solicitors are rewarded by a miniscule percentage of clue-impaired victims who respond to the solicitations. The Net’s immune system has been fighting back, and several varieties of legislation have been proposed, but spam technology seems to be keeping a step ahead of countermeasures. The irony would be painful if the advanced cooperation machinery of many-to-many media is rendered unusable by chronic noncooperation.
The most profound category of threat posed by smart mobs is the threat to human dignity. Our marvelous information technology, claim a number of thoughtful critics, externalizes only one part of human nature, the part that grasps and exploits, the part that harvests efficiency by treating humans like components. Another school of critics warns that the enthusiastic embrace of our muscle-multiplying, brain-extending artificial creations could lead to an abandonment of the biological body—the “posthuman” era.
Symbiosis or Abomination?
Jacques Ellul wrote his bleak and prescient book, The Technological Society, in 1954, when there were no more than a dozen computers in the world. Ellul addressed the seductive danger he perceived in a way of thinking and doing. This way of thinking is necessary for what most of us think of as technology, but it is invisible and not always connected to physical machines. Technique applies to governments as well as artifacts: “the ensemble of practices by which one uses available resources in order to achieve certain valued ends.”43 Slavery is technique. The alphabet is technique. Government is technique. Steam power is technique. Ellul claims the key characteristics of technique are rationality, artificiality, automatism of technical choice, self-augmentation, monism, universalism, and autonomy. A community of computer-wearers who cooperate through a computerized reputation system would seem to fit those criteria.
To Ellul, technique is in the process of rearranging the world and the way humans act in the world. He warned that “human life as a whole is not inundated by technique. It has room for activities that are not rationally or systematically ordered. But the collision between technique and spontaneous activities that are not rationally or systematically ordered is catastrophic for the spontaneous activities.”44 Ellul could have been describing the hyper-coordinated teens of Scandinavia or the hyper-informated households of Silicon Valley—except he wrote those words more than half a century ago.
Like Foucault after him, Ellul was deeply concerned about the way humans were internalizing technique and remaking ourselves in its image, were educating and regulating ourselves to conform to technique’s latest shape, for in that way, technique has proved successful in assimilating everything in its path: “Technique can leave nothing untouched in a civilization. Everything is its concern. Technique, which is destroying all other civilizations, is more than a simple mechanism: it’s a whole civilization in itself.”45
To Ellul, technique is not a malevolent force but a blind force, which by its nature encourages humans to mobilize more and more resources to perfect ever more efficient and powerful techniques. The original “enclosure of the commons,” which started in England around 1730, Ellul pointed out, was the result of the application of technique to both agriculture and ownership. The peasants who had never owned anything but a few animals had been able to graze and cultivate common lands in return for providing labor, a part of their herds and harvests, and fighting men when necessary, to the local lord. The ancient hierarchies of feudalism began to transform into something less hierarchical but radically more dynamic with the advent of a new organizational form, the market. Peasants were fenced out of what used to be the commons when large landowners, the commercial successors to the feudal elite, applied new scientific techniques of agriculture and began to accumulate the new metatechnology, capital. The uprooted peasants fled to the cities, where they served as a workforce for the application of technique to manufacture, first in the textile industry, and then everywhere. Technique reorders human affairs toward more efficient technique, from the “satanic mills” of industrial England to the wearable media of Silicon Valley.
If he were alive today, I suspect Ellul would call the microchip “distilled technique,” and he would declare that the implantation of chips in everything everywhere represents the final, concrete triumph of technique over all human values that can’t be measured, ordered, and mechanized. The problem that would concern Ellul most acutely would not be technique itself but the historic human inability to protect valued qualities of life from technique’s relentless quantification, mechanization, and digitization of everything—including, but not limited to, the very codes of life and processes of biological evolution, the biochemistry of thought and emotion, and the creation of artificial life-forms totally divorced from the realm of flesh. Technique has enabled humans to attain powers we attributed only to the gods a few generations ago. The question is whether we have the wisdom to use our power-tools without amputating something vital.
In 1967, Lewis Mumford, in The Myth of the Machine, proposed that the most powerful and dehumanizing invention was not a visible machine but a social machine in which humans were treated as components in a massive hierarchical system for building pyramids and skyscrapers, empires and civilizations.46 Mumford conjectured origins for what he sometimes called “the megamachine” in a prehistoric arrangement that maps perfectly onto Foucault. Mumford proposed that leaders of the people with muscle, the hunter-kings who had conquered the other local bands of armed men, teamed up with the leaders of the people who had tamed the magic of symbols. The astrologer-priest would anoint the guy with the most loyal spear-carriers as a god, and the god-king would elevate the priest to the leadership of a cult that ordered the lives of their subjects—power/knowledge put in action.
By organizing workforces and military forces hierarchically and breaking their tasks into component parts, entire populations could organize into social machines to build pyramids and conquer empires. By freeing a priestly elite for intellectual training, the administration of empire became possible, and the tools of imperial administrators—numbers and alphabets—set the stage for more efficient organization (what Foucault would call discipline) and the power/knowledge that literacy enabled. Are networked thumb tribes playing with a form of counter-power to hierarchical megamachines? We’ve considered what tyrannies smart mobs might enable. And we’ve seen that the alphabetic weapon of Mesopotamian despots became the foundations of democracies. What liberties might the intelligent use of mobile and pervasive media make possible?
One of the first pioneers of artificial intelligence research, an MIT researcher named Joseph Weizenbaum, applied the arguments posed by Ellul and Mumford directly to the future of computing, a field he knew well. In Computer Power and Human Reason, published in 1976, Weizen-baum emphasized that the aspect of human nature that computers externalize is our most machine-like aspect.47 He called this “the tyranny of instrumental reasoning,” building on Heidegger’s view of technology as the result of a human tendency to “enframe” the world by converting it into a resource to be used to some end.48 Weizenbaum warned that it would be a terrible mistake to believe all human problems are computable. Anticipating the voluntary cyborgs of future decades, Weizenbaum declared that it would be an abomination to start connecting the nervous tissue of living creatures to future computers. Conside
ring that part of Steve Mann’s WearComp involves a number of electrodes affixed to his body to monitor his heart rhythm and other bodily processes, the era of the cyborg ceased to be a future development a few years back.
“Cyborg,” or “cybernetic organism,” is a term that Mann and other wearable computer enthusiasts use proudly to describe their technically augmented capabilities, and they say it with no more sense of shame than they would exhibit when saying that they wear eyeglasses or look through a microscope. As medical technology provides more and more intimately bio-connected mechanical life-support systems, and more people spend more time in communication with mechanical thinking aids, an entire literature of cyborg criticism has grown up.49 One critic, Mark Dery, argued in his 1996 book, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, that certain cyborg subcultures who call themselves “extropians” or “transhumanists” actively seek to transcend the flesh, projecting a quasi-mystical faith onto the scientific whiz-bangery of technology.50 These extreme technophiles ask why we should put up with the messiness, mortality, limitations in intelligence and physical power that accompany the human body as it evolved biologically, now that we seem to be on the verge of building more effective substitutes for vital organs. Isn’t it foolish, they propose, to refuse to research technologies of immortality when eternal life might be within the grasp of modern science?51 Dery warns that transhumanism might be leading us away from humanity as we know it and into something Ellul might have predicted— a world in which we become fine-tuned down to our DNA as components in ever consuming, ever expanding, profit-generating machinery.
Smart Mobs Page 28