Identity Transformations

3 :: NEW TECHNOLOGIES,

NEW MOBILITIES

Finally, as a result of the widespread use of miniaturized mobilities, the technological

unconscious comes to the fore and functions as a psycho social mechanism for the

negotiation of sociabilities based upon widespread patterns of absence, lack, distance

and disconnection. In underscoring the generative, creative aspects of the unconscious

for both self-identity and social relations, Freud uncovered the complex, contradictory

emotional connections between presence and absence – for example in the Oedipus

complex, or the ‘symbolic order’ in Jacques Lacan’s Freud – which constitute psychic

life.^16 In classical Freudian theory, patterns of presence and absence primarily refer to

significant others, such as parents, siblings, extended family and such like. With

complex, network-driven systems, by contrast, we witness the emergence of various

‘virtual’ others and objects resulting from the revolution of digital technologies. These

virtual others and objects reconstitute the back ground to psychic experiences of

presence and absence in novel ways, through, for example, the virtual experience of

otherness in Second Life. As a result, it is necessary to speak of a technological

unconscious at work in the negotiation of social relations involving high degrees of

absence, distance and disconnection.^17 This last theme provides a convenient transition

to the next section of the chapter, which deals with the transformations of emotional

containment brought about by digital, wireless technologies.

DIGITAL LIFE: DEPOSITS, STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL OF AFFECT

The backdrop here is the restructuring, or renegotiation, of professional and personal

realms that is characteristic of mobile lives. The technocommunications systems of

twenty-first-century mobilities create slices of life where people can simultaneously

be ‘on the move’, access vast amounts of information, and communicate with others

(both near and far) in real time through miniaturized mobilities. As we have seen in

the case of Sandra, approaching life in terms of mobile technologies certainly has its

rewarding and uplifting aspects – as the more or less constant techno logical

communication and continual travel produce a world of rapid change and dazzling

excitement. But mobile life also has some very unsettling aspects, again connected

to the sheer momentum of change and often tied to novel trials and tribulations

stemming from difficulties in relating professional, intimate and family lives. Mobile

technologies, as Sandra’s story reveals, assist in connecting, understanding and

discovering meaningful aspects entailed by the various time–space dislocations of life

‘on the move’. But technological intervention into, and restructuring of, mobile lives

result in no straight forward victory over emotional difficulties. For, whatever the

more positive aspects heralded by mobile lives (and we do not deny that they are

many and varied), we emphasize that life ‘on the move’ is also bumpy, full of the

unexpected and unpredictable, involving considerable ambivalence.

(^16) See Anthony Elliott, Social theory and
psychoanalysis in transition (London: Free
Association Books, 2nd edition, 1999).
(^17) See Patricia Clough, Auto-affection:
unconscious thought in the age of
technology (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 2000).