3 :: NEW TECHNOLOGIES,
NEW MOBILITIES
interwoven with the body, become organized in terms of ‘movement-spaces’: as
software-operated, digital technologies that serve to augment the mobile capacities
of individuals.But there is more at stake than just the technical and socio-spatial range of such
digital technologies. Miniaturized mobilities influence social relations in more subtle
ways, especially in regard to the redrafting of the self. Lay under standings of such
digital technologies tend to emphasize the expanded reach of the self’s communicative
actions – of ‘what can be done’. In doing this, lay understandings of digital lifestyles are
surely correct, but this is only part of the story. The individual self does not just ‘use’, or
activate, digital technologies in day-to-day life. On the contrary, the self – in conditions
of intensive mobilities – becomes deeply ‘layered’ within technological networks, as
well as reshaped by their influence. Indeed, as we explore in this chapter, not only are
mobile lives lived against the digital backdrop of miniaturized mobilities, but such
portable technical systems give specific form to the self’s relations with affect, anxiety,
memory and desire.There are four central ways in which miniaturized mobilities enter into the
constitution of self and of other novel social patterns, all of which are discernable
from Sandra’s mobile life.First there is mobile connectivity, which, in constituting the person as the portal, unties
the self from specific locations or places and reconfigures identity as dispersed, adrift,
‘on the move’. ‘Mobile phones’, writes Barry Wellman, ‘afford a fundamental liberation
from place.’^9 If landline telephones designate a fixed location (for example, ‘the office’),
mobile telephony (an example par excellence of miniaturized mobilities) is emblematic
of wireless technology, international roaming, spatial fluidity. This much is clear from
Sandra’s personalized, wireless world, in which – as the designer of her own networks
and connections – she is able to remain in routine contact with colleagues, friends and
family, no matter where she is travelling. In so doing, Sandra’s life is reflective of wider
social trends: not only are there now more mobile phones than landline phones, but
research undertaken by Nokia suggests that approximately two-thirds of the world’s
population will deploy mobile connectivity by 2015.^10 This worldwide spread of powerful,
inter dependent, communications-based systems forms a virtual infrastructure, or
what Knorr Cetina terms ‘flow architectures’,^11 for the routine, repetitive actions that
constitute the mobile lives of many today. Such virtual back grounds – mobile phones,
ringtones, voicemail, signals, satellites – make it possible for Sandra to activate email
while driving to London, transfer voice recordings to her secretary at the push of a
button and video-call her family back home in Leeds. One consequence of digital(^9) Barry Wellman, ‘Physical space and
cyberplace: the rise of personalized
networking’, International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research, 2001, 25: p. 238.
(^10) See John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge:
Polity, 2007), Chapter 5.
(^11) Karin Knorr Cetina, ‘How are global
markets global? The architecture of a flow
world’, Economics at Large Conference,
14–15 November 2003.