Communication and mobile privatization
The role of communication in urban cultures cannot simply be reduced to
the multiplication of urban units but relates to the way the communica-
tive mediums which they make possible allow for ever greater mobilities
from within these units. This tendency is accentuated by the diffusion of
new media, as the virtual urban futures thesis maintains (see Chapter 3),
but in truth it is characteristic of all electronic media, not just those of a
second media age. As I have argued elsewhere (Holmes, 2001), electronic
media do not have to be portable to provide mobility, as it is possible to
‘travel’ with audio-visual and interface media, even when the body is in
stasis.
The products of information capitalism are themselves commodities,
but their most significant quality is that they commodify subjective and
intersubjective experience. In the context of urban cultures, the endgame
of such a process culminates in private bubbles of communication and
commuting.
The definition of ‘private’ is here extended from its typical use in
economics and politics. As Margaret Morse (1998) uses it in a spatial
sense, privatization refers to the way in which certain urban spaces, like
privately owned and controlled shopping malls and the home, become
refuges which de-realize their ‘outside’ environments. For example, the
historical separation of workplace and household becomes exaggerated
by broadcast media, where the shrinking public realm only has enough
room in it for work itself, whilst the pursuit of leisure is expected to take
place in the home. ‘The process of distancing the worker from the work-
place and the enclosure of domestic life in the home, separated from its
social surroundings, allowed a compensatory realm of fantasy to flourish’
(109). For Morse, the home physically disconnects itself from an
outside, virtualizing itself on scales that expand as the public realm
contracts.
Such privacy, described in the information technology industry as
‘personalization’, was advanced by Raymond Williams (1983) in his con-
cept of mobile privatization: ‘At most active social levels people are
increasingly living as private small-family units or, disrupting even that,
as private and deliberately self-enclosed individuals, while at the same
time there is an unprecedented mobility of such restricted privacies’ (188).
Williams argues that the private ‘shells’ of the motor car, office and home
unit gradually become extended by new media in ways in which it
becomes possible to travel without physical movement. The paradox of
MTV or the World Wide Web is that thousands of images can stream past
us every hour, where we can be transported around the world at lightning
speed, sampling countless other places, styles and impressions, whilst we
are stationed in absolute stasis, our only motion being with a mouse or
remote control. New media give us a mobility which exempts the con-
sumer from having to leave the comfort of his or her shell, even his or herThe Interrelation between Broadcast and Network Communication 91Holmes-04.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 91