Identity Transformations

3 :: NEW TECHNOLOGIES,

NEW MOBILITIES

• the reorganization of temporal/spatial settings or contexts in human sensory
  experience. Doing two different things at once, and the psychic corollary of being in
  two different places at once, became wide - spread with daily use of the Walkman:
  ‘being in a typically crowded, noisy, urban space while also being tuned in, through
  your headphones, to the very different, imaginary space or soundscape in your head
  which develops in conjunction with the music you are listening to’.

In more recent years, the emergence of portable, powerful communications-based

systems – the ‘mobile machines’ of BlackBerry devices and iPhones, Bluetooth

wireless connectivity, laptops and compact DVD players – have fast transformed the

production, organization and dissemination of interpersonal communication,

information-sharing and know ledge transfer. This can be seen, for example, in the

revolution of private databases concerning addresses, contacts, schedules, photos and

music. Whereas traditional, stationary forms of communication (letters, telegrams)

were dependent upon large, bulky collections of information (office filing cabinets,

family photo collections, large music libraries), today’s post-traditional, digitized

world of communication initiates new kinds of ‘virtual object’, increasingly central to

mobile lives. These miniaturized systems, often carried directly on the body and thus

increasingly central to the organization of self, are software-based and serve to inform

various aspects of the self’s communication with itself, others and the wider world.

Electronic address books, hand-held iPhoto libraries, iTunes music collections, digital

video libraries: these techno-systems usher in worlds that are information rich, of

considerable sensory and auditory complexity, as well as easily transportable.

As miniaturized mobilities are packaged and sold in the marketplace as smaller,

sleeker and more stylish than ‘last year’s model’, so the capacity to use such

technical objects as corporeally interwoven with the body grows exponentially.

Castells captures the contemporariness of this well:

What is specific to our world is the extension and augmentation of

the body and mind of human subjects in networks of interaction

powered by micro-electronics-based, software-operated,

communications technologies. These technologies are

increasingly diffused throughout the entire realm of human

activity by growing miniaturization.^7

This twinning of lives and systems through miniaturized mobilities is also captured

by Thrift’s notion of ‘movement-spaces’, that is: ‘the utterly mundane frameworks

that move “subjects” and “objects” about’.^8 Miniaturized mobilities, corporeally

(^7) Manuel Castells, ‘Informationalism,
networks and the network society: a
theoretical blueprint’, in Manuel Castells
(ed.), The network society (Cheltenham:
Edward Elgar, 2004), p. 7.
(^8) Nigel Thrift, ‘Movement-space: the
changing domain of thinking resulting
from the development of new kinds of
spatial awareness’, Economy and Society,
2004, 33: p. 583.