Identity Transformations

3 :: NEW TECHNOLOGIES,

NEW MOBILITIES

NEW TECHNOLOGIES, NEW MOBILITIES

As we encounter the object world we are substantially

metamorphosed by the structure of objects; internally

transformed by objects that leave their trace within us.

Christopher Bollas^1

DIGITAL MOBILITIES

Sandra Fletcher is sophisticated and smart – a high-profile advertising executive.^2

At forty-four, she describes her life as ‘full’ in both professional and personal terms.

The mother of three children (ranging in age from nine to fourteen), and married to

a successful architect, Sandra divides her week between the family home in Leeds

and the company office in London. She had felt somewhat troubled about a working

arrangement that would take her away from her family three (and sometimes four)

nights a week, or at least she did when first experimenting with living and working

this way some years ago. But much of her worry was unfounded. Her children have

adapted well to her weekly absence and appear fond of the live-in nanny whom

Sandra and her husband, Michael, selected (and screened) from an agency, many

of which have spring up in order to provide mobile childcare for mobile couples. She

also discovered that her relationship with Michael was fine, indeed thriving, when

living and working away during the week and then reuniting for ‘quality time’ over

weekends. Taken together, these factors meant she could feel relaxed about

navigating the demands of her professional and personal lives. Indeed, she looks

forward to the routine departure from Leeds on Tuesday mornings, eager to embrace

the exciting challenges of professional life in London.

Helping her coordinate, manage and sort through this life divided between London

and Leeds are various digital technologies. For Sandra threads and rethreads her

professional and personal life together through the use of such technologies.

She actively embraces a digital lifestyle. An avid follower of consumer electronic

technologies, mobile and wireless products, Sandra relies on mobile communications

in order to keep on the move, to access information and to communicate with others.

From the broadband terrain of wireless and storage technology to videoconferencing

and laptop imaging, Sandra deploys digital lifestyle technologies in order to fashion a

mobile, multiplex, connected life with others. In doing so, she has found a new kind of

freedom: one that allows her to experience and explore other kinds of communication,

information and knowledge. This has been of key importance to her professional

success, to locating herself in new and ever-expanding advertising networks, and to the

The following is excerpted from
Mobile Lives by Anthony Elliott
and John Urry.
©2010 Taylor & Francis Group.
All rights reserved.

Purchase a copy HERE.

(^1) Christopher Bollas, Being a character:
psychoanalysis and self experience
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 59.
(^2) The figure of Sandra is a composite of
two case studies for research funded by
an Australian Research Council Discovery
Grant (DP877817).