3 :: NEW TECHNOLOGIES,
NEW MOBILITIES
CONCLUSION
In this chapter, we have critically appraised the role of digital technologies in the
constitution of mobile lives. Especially significant to living mobile lives are the multiple
and intersecting software-operated, digital technologies that we term miniaturized
mobilities. From Apple iPhones to Bluetooth wireless connectivity, miniaturized
mobilities are corporeally interwoven with the body and serve to augment the mobile
capacities of individual subjects in physical, communicative and virtual forms. We have
outlined various ways in which new digital technologies enter into the patterning and
restructuring of mobile lives, with particular concentration on the theme of emotional
anxiety and its containment. Drawing from post- Freudian developments in
psychoanalysis, we argued that digital life is increasingly organized as deposits, storage
and retrieval of affect in and through miniaturized mobilities. From this perspective, we
noted that virtual objects such as Facebook, Second Life or Skype are used, in part, for
the ‘holding’ or containment of anxiety. We further noted that such containment can
either facilitate thinking in relation to mobile lives, or can turn defensively back upon
the self in various pathologies of mobile lives. Throughout, we have emphasized that
the living of digital lives, realized increasingly through the augmentation of miniaturized
mobilities, occurs in the broader context of complex networks of connection, and this
provides the connection to the next chapter, on networks.