3 :: NEW TECHNOLOGIES,
NEW MOBILITIES
consumed by, the ‘film’ of her life, and especially of her role as mother to her young
children. She speaks of the ‘thousands’ of family photos she has stored on Google’s
Picasa, and of devoting extensive time to cataloguing these family snapshots,
arranging them in folders. She also spends countless hours editing home-recorded
family videos, mixing vision and sound on Apple’s iMovie. Sandra comments that she
finds all this engrossing, captivating, but she worries that she might be a little ‘too
obsessive’, given the amount of time devoted to her digital life. At the emotional core
of this experience, as we will subsequently examine, there lies anxiety, mourning
and melancholia.
What does Sandra’s mobile life tell us about the role of new digital technologies in
contemporary societies? What are the social consequences of digital technologies
in light of the rise of global mobilities? Do software operated, digital, wireless
technologies give rise to any specific contemporary anxieties? Do they contain anxiety,
or do they help create it? In exploring these and related questions, this chapter
examines how mobile lives are interwoven with digital technologies and are reshaped
in the process as techno-mobilities. Throughout the chapter, we explore how mobile
lives are fashioned and transformed through various technological forms – virtualities,
electronic discourse – in the emotional connections people develop with themselves,
others and the wider world. Today’s culture of mobile lives, we argue, is substantially
created in and through the deployment of various miniaturized mobilities – mobile
phones, laptop computers, wireless connections. We introduce and contextualize the
concept of miniaturized mobilities in the next section of this chapter, deploying it to
underscore how digital technologies intricately interweave with mobile lives.
Computers and databases, mobile telephony and SMS texting, the internet and email,
digital broadcast and satellites, all go into performing mobile lives. Yet digital
technologies also facilitate the mobilization of feelings and affect, memories and
desires, dreams and anxieties. What is at stake in the deployment of communications
technologies in mobile lives, we contend, is not simply an increased digitization of
social relationships, but a broad and extensive change in how emotions are contained
(stored, deposited, retrieved) and thus a restructuring of identity more generally.
DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES AND MINIATURIZED MOBILITIES
The dichotomies of professional/private, work/home, external/internal and
presence/absence are all put into question by Sandra’s mobile life. Such a digital
life is inextricably intertwined with the engendering of new kinds of sociability, as
Sandra’s mobile connectivity serves to both expand the network capital she enjoys in
advertising and rewrites experiences of her personal and family life in more fluid and