3 :: NEW TECHNOLOGIES,
NEW MOBILITIES
Understanding how miniaturized machines play an important role in containing many
forms of anxiety helps explain why, in conditions of complexmobilities, people come
to dwell within communications networks, activities and capabilities. There is an
emerging literature on this subject, although we do not review it in detail.^18
‘Technological containment’ may sound some-what odd or jarring, as the term
‘containment’ is usually associated with the sympathy or support of another person
(for example, a therapist) in much psycho logical research. On an emotional plane,
however, there are close connections between digital technologies, miniaturized
mobilities and emotional containment. Think, for example, of a person talking on
their mobile phone while on a train: the intimacy shared with the person to whom
they are speaking may be very close (even though this other is ‘at–a-distance’), while
those co-present on the train merely ‘fade into the background’. In ‘filtering out’ the
presence of other people on the train, a sense of self-identity involving perhaps major
transitions or tensions – for example, a marriage breakdown – might be explored in
the mobile phone conversation. In such a situation, miniaturized mobilities facilitate
forms of emotional containment – the opportunity to express and explore anxieties,
doubts, worries or dangers.One reason we chose to write about Sandra’s story is that her experiences of digital
technologies reflect the deeply ambivalent psychological dimensions that come to the
fore in living mobile lives. There is, for example, little doubt that Sandra’s routine use
of miniaturized mobilities helps her maintain ‘shared histories’ of intimacy with her
family. Sandra’s shared history of intimacy with her family may be created and
sustained through very different orderings of time and space to those processes of
intimacy she was part of when living full time in Leeds as a young mother, but,
nevertheless, the role of miniaturized mobilities is plainly evident in how she today
integrates aspects of her family’s calendar into her professional and personal lives.
To that extent, Sandra’s digital life is deeply dialogical, built as it is out of ongoing
virtual connections with significant others. Mobile technologies thus play, not only a
facilitating role in the maintenance of Sandra’s close emotional bonds, but a
containing one as well. She comments, for instance, that she finds it ‘deeply
reassuring’ to know that she can have virtually instantaneous contact with family
members at-a-distance through mobile telephony or electronic communications
(assuming they work). Again, this is partly to do with the ‘use’ of such technologies;
but, more than that, miniaturized mobilities offer some reassurance, some degree of
emotional containment of anxiety, even when not activated. Simply knowing that her
mobile is ‘at hand’, or that she can see and talk with her children through Skype if
she wants to, is oftentimes enough to contain Sandra’s anxieties about working and(^18) For an overview of psychoanalytic
contributions to the analysis of
technological containment, see Anthony
Elliott, Subject to ourselves: social theory,
psycho analysis and postmodernity
(Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2004).
Also see Mark Poster, The second media
age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).