Theories of the Mobile Internet

Materialities and Imaginaries

Andrew Herman, Jan Hadlaw, Thom Swiss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317911111
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

This volume proposes the mobile Internet is best understood as a socio-technical "assemblage" of objects, practices, symbolic representations, experiences and affects. Authors from a variety of disciplines discuss practices mediated through mobile communication, including current phone and tablet devices. The converging concepts of Materialities (ranging from the political economy of communication to physical devices) and Imaginaries (including cultural values, desires and perceptions) are touchstones for each of the chapters in the book.

Part I
The Politics of Mobility and Immobility

1
“We Shall Not Be Moved”

On the Politics of Immobility

Darin Barney

“I am going nowhere.” That’s Willie Corduff, a farmer, protesting the proposed landfall of Shell’s Corrib Gas Pipeline at Glengad Beach, near Rossport in the West of Ireland. Corduff was jailed for ninety-four days in 2005 for refusing to allow the company to enter his land to lay a high-pressure, raw gas pipeline. Reflecting on his own resistance to the pipeline, which saw him and his son arrested and jailed for obstructing the development, Rossport lobster and crab fisherman Pat O’Donnell observed, “This could go on forever” (Domhnaill 2010). By “this” he meant the political struggle of his community to retain some degree of control over the immediate material conditions of their economic and social lives.

This chapter is not about pipelines or fishers or farmers. Instead, my aim is to ask a few questions about the moral valorization of the mobile Internet and the prevalent cultural designation of mobile access to information and communication networks as something basically “good,” something like freedom. More broadly, these are questions about the critical status of the norm of mobility itself, upon which this valorization of mobile and mobilizing technologies at least partly hangs. My concern is with the status of the norm of mobility in relation to the possibility of politics and it is in this respect that the story of the good people of Rossport serves as an instructive introduction. Cultural geographer Timothy Cresswell (2010, 21) defines politics as “the social relations that involve the production and distribution of power,” and the politics of mobility as “the ways in which mobilities are both productive of such social relations and produced by them,” adding that “speeds, slowness and immobilities are all related in ways that are thoroughly infused with power and its distribution.” This is undoubtedly true but, in what follows, I propose a slight shift in emphasis, from politics understood as the distribution of power to politics understood as the disruption of power and, correspondingly, from the politics of mobility to the politics of immobility.

Among the six elements Cresswell (2010, 26) lists as comprising the politics of mobility is the question “when and how does it stop?” By this he means to draw attention to the tendency of contemporary injustices to take the form of friction, experienced by those whose mobility is impeded when they might otherwise choose to keep moving. Involuntary immobility enforced upon those who occupy the lower registers of various socioeconomic hierarchies is certainly one manner in which inegalitarian and unjust distributions of power are currently manifested and maintained. However, I would like to explore the opposite dynamic, whereby immobilities enforced by those who occupy these lower registers upon those who would prefer that they, and things, just keep moving become a significant source of political disruption. Cresswell’s politics of mobility implies that the question of “where and when does it stop?” refers primarily to the mobility of individuals who would like to keep moving but are prevented from doing so by powerful actors and structures over which they have little or no influence. The operative question in this situation becomes: “Is stopping a choice, or is it forced?” (Cresswell 2010, 26). By contrast, from the perspective of a politics of immobility, we might instead consider that “where and when does it stop?” is often the question asked by those who (like the people of Rossport) find themselves in a situation where they have no choice but to act, often collectively, to disrupt some force that is moving inexorably against them. Of course, such disruptions often take time. Here, I suggest that in a material context in which mobility and its technologies (including things like gas pipelines and wireless telephone networks) are structurally related to economic power and therefore culturally normalized, the possibility of politics might rely precisely on “going nowhere” and “going on forever.”

The cultural valorization of mobile information and communication technologies (which has now been fairly generalized in commercial advertising, popular culture and economic development discourse) relies on a simultaneous, and perhaps even prior, elevation of mobility itself to the status of an unimpeachable norm, one that corresponds roughly with freedom, and which via this correspondence articulates with liberal discourses of rights, justice and democracy. Cresswell (2010, 21) captures this well when he writes:

Some of the foundational narratives of modernity have been constructed around the brute fact of moving. Mobility as liberty, mobility as progress. Everyday language reveals some of the meanings that accompany the idea of movement. We are always trying to get somewhere. No one wants to be stuck or bogged down.

As he points out in his earlier book On the Move, this articulation reaches back to what is arguably the founding expression of a distinctly modern political imaginary, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, in which Hobbes, influenced by Galileo, presents the cosmos, including the world and its beings, as a system of objects in motion that rest only when forcibly stopped by external impediment (Cresswell 2006, 14–16). Motion, a natural state equated with freedom, is good; involuntary rest, ultimately equated with death, is bad. Hobbes’s (1968) insight was that completely unregulated motion amongst human beings in social situations would lead to a proliferation of violent collisions. In the state of nature, unrestricted freedom of movement degenerates into its opposite: paralysis and death, and so Hobbes described the wager of society in terms of an artificial social contract, in which individuals exchange complete freedom and mobility for partial freedom and mobility, secured by a sovereign authorized to protect individual bodies in motion from other bodies in motion. Since the time of Hobbes, in both theory and practice, we have seen wide variation in the practical balance between individual freedom or mobility and the extent of sovereign authority, ranging from authoritarian situations in which the margin of individual freedom and mobility is thin, to liberal democratic situations in which the scope of individual mobility, rights and freedom is thought to be relatively broad by comparison.

The point is this: the moral valorization of mobility did not originate with the iPhone. The equation of freedom with mobility has been the central precept of the modern political imaginary from the outset. Accordingly, questioning the moral valorization of the mobile Internet in the contemporary context necessarily entails questioning the moral valorization of mobility itself in this imaginary, and while Hobbes (and many others after) might have been prepared to accept the equation of mobility and freedom as an objective, universal, scientifically established “fact,” we know that that this proposition, and the norms that have been derived from it, were and are—like all knowledge propositions and norms—culturally produced and sustained. Indeed, it is the cultural and historical specificity of the ontological equation of the human with freedom, and of freedom with mobility (equations which, by the way, articulate very nicely with certain ideas about technology and market economies) that invites us to interrogate mobility as a norm that is contingent rather than necessary.

Among the things upon which the critical salience of the norm of mobility is contingent is the differential manner in which particular subjects or classes of subjects are afforded or denied it. Consider: the ongoing reality of denial of entry to asylum seekers at national borders; the threat of bodily violence that prevents women from moving safely through urban spaces; the spatial confinement of troublesome, typically racialized, people and populations by state authorities; the architectural denial of access to public spaces experienced daily by people with disabilities; the importance of mobile access to communication networks in uprisings against authoritarian regimes; and the isolation of senior citizens unable to get groceries or fill prescriptions because they cannot risk an icy sidewalk. Confronted with all this, categorical denial of the political urgency of mobility and its technologies is difficult to sustain. As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello observe in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005, 361), mobility is a crucial nexus of exploitation in highly networked economies: “In fact, in a connexionist world, mobility—the ability to move around autonomously not only in geographical space, but also between people, or in mental space, between ideas—is an essential quality of great men, such that the little people are characterized primarily by their fixity (their inflexibility).”

If mobility equals greatness and immobility poverty, then the prescription would seem obvious: get moving. However, the redistribution of certain forms of technologically enabled mobility and “flexibility” such that the little people might “enjoy” more of these seems to suit the interests of the great men just fine. How else to explain the consistency with which the merchants of transnational communicative capitalism express their claims upon our attention, bodies, money, time, creativity and imagination in terms of the imperative of incessant movement? Mobility—of information, communication and access to them; and of working people and consumers—and its contemporary technologies, are both culturally fetishized and essential structural conditions of contemporary economic and political power. Ours is a situation in which the experience of at least certain forms of mobility is relatively (though perhaps not perfectly equally) well-distributed, and in many cases even compulsory. This is the situation “enjoyed” by most of the working- and middle-class citizens of Euro-American capitalist liberal-democracies. With important limitations, exceptions and gradations indexed to age, gender, ethnicity and ability, these are people for whom both the experience and priority of mobility, especially as mediated by emerging information and communication technologies, is more or less normal. When Boltanski and Chiapello (2005, 361) write: “Great men do not stand still. Little people remain rooted to the spot,” they express perfectly the “mobilist” ideology of networked capitalism. They also seem to appreciate the sociological ambiguity of this characterization. For it is far from clear that in responding to the ideological imperative to keep moving, the little people accomplish much beyond delivering themselves more effectively into their own exploitation by great men. As Boltanski and Chiapello (2005, 468) observe, when it comes to “loosening the grip of capitalism as an oppressive instance … One critical orientation, which is seemingly paradoxical given that mobility and liberation have hitherto been closely associated, is to be sought in challenging mobility as a prerequisite and incontestable value.” Whereas a politics of distribution might recommend extending the presumed benefits of mobility and its technologies universally, a politics of disruption might instead require rejection of the very premise upon which this apparently egalitarian distributive inclination is based.

This proposition relies on a specification that associates politics with those activities by which an established horizon of consensus is disrupted. Such a specification is given by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière (2010a, vii), who characterizes consensus as the sense that “what is, is all there is.” We live, Rancière says, in more or less consensual times. He (2010a, x) contrasts consensus with another way of being in the world, a way of being that “lays claim to one present against another and affirms that the visible, thinkable and possible can be described in many ways. This other way has a name. It is called politics.” Rancière (2010a, 2) goes on to write that “Politics is the way of concerning oneself with human affairs based on the mad presupposition that anyone is as intelligent as anyone else and that at least one more thing can always be done other than what is being done.” Becoming political means refusing to take the present state of things as given. It means disrupting the consensus that says that what is, is all there is, and that nothing can be done other than what is being done. Becoming political, as Rancière (2010a, 3) puts it, means claiming “the right to attend to the future.” Such politics entail judgment and action that alter the parameters of the possible and the impossible in any given situation. It is the sort of politics that can be distinguished from what Rancière (1999, 28–30) elsewhere calls “police,” referring to those agencies, practices and institutions—including the institutions of liberal democratic government—whose function it is to contain the disruptive possibility of politics, even as they give the impression of it.

In what relation to this sort of politics do mobility and its technologies stand? As discussed above, mobility is foundational to modern western conceptions of freedom. Another conspicuous aspect of Western modernity is the promise that freedom-as-mobility can be delivered by technology. Modern western culture has thus reserved a special place in its imaginary for transportation technologies—trains and railways, automobiles and highways, airplanes and skyways, rockets and space travel—that were supposed to deliver on the promise of freedom as technologically enabled movement through space. But no mere transportation technology could ever truly fulfill the ultimate dream of mobility: the dream of being in two places at one time. It was only when electricity supposedly made it possible to liberate communication from its reliance on transportation that progress toward this dream began in earnest, via a succession of communication technologies and accompanying rhetorics that have culminated in contemporary digital networks and loose talk about the annihilation of distance, time-space compression, the empire of speed and interactivity in real time.

As Jonathan Sterne (2006) has persuasively argued, communication and transportation are perhaps not so easily, or so advisedly, separated as either James Carey’s canonical account of the telegraph or residual preoccupations with the symbolic over the material dimensions of communication would have us believe. It is thus commendable that the “mobilities paradigm,” as it has been formulated by John Urry (2007, 147), includes the corporeal travel of bodies and the physical movement of objects (i.e., transportation) as well as the imaginative, virtual and communicative movement of symbols and representations. Scholars of mobility know very well that mobility entails both transportation and communication (perhaps the missing term here is mediation, of which both transportation and communication are forms). In the popular (and certainly the commercial) imaginary, freedom-as-mobility spe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Theories of the Mobile Internet: Mobilities, Assemblages, Materialities and Imaginaries
• Part I The Politics of Mobility and Immobility
• Part II Mobile Pasts and Futures
• Part III Living Mobile Lives
• Contributors
• Index