3 :: NEW TECHNOLOGIES,
NEW MOBILITIES
theory takes us, our claim is that digital technologies should be understood, at least
in part, in relation to the containment of anxiety and emotional conflicts of the self.
That is to say, mobile technologies are not only technical objects of adjustment
through which people coordinate their activities with others. They are also
constitutive of how people go about the production and transformation of their mobile
lives. As anxiety, trust and technologies of mobile interaction are intricately inter
woven, it is not surprising that miniaturized mobilities should function to some large
extent as containing mechanisms. For miniaturized mobilities, we contend, are never
free of the emotions, anxieties and conflicts of the individuals that use them.
The difficulties and complexities of containment are certainly evident from Sandra’s
story, a woman who has poured a good deal of her need for emotional contact into
digital technologies. In a sense, there is much that is ordinary in Sandra’s use of digital
technologies as a mechanism of anxiety reduction. Like millions the world over, she
uses mobile telephony, the internet and related electronic communications to keep in
touch with significant others in her daily life. Although somewhat unremarkable from
a lay standpoint (after all, this is arguably how people now live throughout advanced,
network societies), it is worth underscoring the importance of such technologies to the
emotional fabric of Sandra’s life. Such technologies are deeply interwoven with all
aspects of Sandra’s professional and personal activities, from mobile conference
meetings with colleagues (also ‘on the move’) to the scheduling and rescheduling of
family get-togethers and outings. As we have seen, however, this mobile life extends
well beyond the use of digital technologies to maintain relations of generalized contact
or intimacy with others. Her technological activities also become the means by which
she makes a connection with other, displaced (and sometimes only barely recognized
or acknowledged) aspects of self-experience. Although an immersion in such
technologies – in this instance, Picasa and iMovie – was gratifying in the early stages
of her time living in London, with the sense that more and more of her evenings were
taken up with such activities, it was as though Sandra was becoming disconnected
from her own life. Perhaps this is why she expressed concern about the ‘obsessional’
aspects of such activity.
There is the sense here of digital technologies shifting in Sandra’s experience from
intoxicating to threatening. Listening to how she talks about her intensely mobile
worlds of mediated interaction, it is as if she is describing a psychic power struggle
between her personal and techno – logical lives, of which the latter comes to limit the
former. What has limited Sandra’s inner reality, it seems, is the isolation experienced
as she goes about her entrenched ways of using, and her absorption in, these
technologies. It is as if this confrontation with mobile technology for Sandra has