particular technology could be said to carry a spirit or Geist which defines
an age. Secondly, he rightly points out that few analyses relate the causes
of the development of individual technologies to a range of locatable
political and economic interests, rather than simply technical progress.
For him, technological determinism is an outcome of some or other
‘expressive totality’ view of technology as inevitable, and he wants to
restore a sense of agency and policy to media technology.
However, Williams does not address the fact that when media
become apparatus and networks which people live with and work with
in an everyday sense, they have meta-psychological and social dynamics
which are quite independent from how they have emerged. Of course the
tendency to place the meaning of these networks and apparatuses within
some kind of expressive Geisttheory is a simplifying temptation – a
simplification which Williams is justifiably annoyed with.
The kind of sociality which emerges in media environments is typi-
cally ‘embedded’ in networks or groupings of techno-social mobility.
These networks, which alwaysinvolve actions that are embedded within
technical means of communication or transportation, become meaningful-
in-themselves, not as means to extend face-to-face relationships.
John Urry (2002) argues that in most contemporary literature on mobil-
ity an appreciation of the embeddedness of forms of sociality in a net-
work/medium is precluded by the pervasive dichotomies within which
technologically extended mobility is thought. The dichotomies of ‘[r]eal/
unreal, face-to-face/life on the screen, immobile/mobile, community/virtual
and presence/absence’ (7) are each premised on the former term providing
some pre-virtual knowable other which is in some way threatened or trans-
formed by new forms of mobile ‘at-a-distance’ connections.Normally, this knowable other is characterised as ‘real’, as opposed to the
air y, fragile, and virtual relationships of the electronic. And the real is normally
taken to involve the concept of ‘community’. Real life is seen to comprise
enduring, face-to-face, communitarian connection, while the virtual world is
made up of fragile, mobile, air y and inchoate connections. (2002: 1)In opposition to such a limit-paradigm, Urry argues that all societies
have exhibited and continue to exhibit diverse ‘at-a-distance’ connections,
‘more or less intense, more or less mobile, and more or less machinic....
All social relationships involve complex patterns of immediate presence
and intermittent absence at-a-distance’ (1).
By arguing that extended forms of connection are just as ‘real’ as
propinquitous ones, or that, in a sense, all forms of community are
‘telecommunities’, and vice versa, we avoid one-dimensional, utopian or
dystopian accounts of community.
That persons may become attached and embedded in techno-social
networks across vast dimensions of metropolises and the globe does not
mean that such networks have abolished less technologically mediatedTelecommunity 179Holmes-06.qxd 2/15/2005 1:03 PM Page 179