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5.
INVASION OF THE SUBWAY
The human body is able
to become adept at functioning in an immobile state. Activity
for the digital being is a disembodied event; it is possible to
have an impact on a space one does not have to physically take
up. This way of configuring the cause and effect of individual
action has given many comfort in their inhabitance of a computer
chair. Surfers and mouse potatoes need not feel guilty: that they
cannot see the outcome of their doing does not mean they are being
ineffectual. Examined at the level of say, person-to-person bartering
over eBay, the implications of the ability to connect to the world
from a stationary position seem consequential only in their perpetuation
of global capitalism. One who can reach out to the limits of the
universe from their living room, seems only willing to do so in
order to buy what the "limits of the universe" is selling.
Yet it is apparent in our social consciousness that our greatest
fears of apocalypse could be realized from a cozy place behind
a computer screen.
Perhaps
it is the fear of what is hypothetically possible while sitting
at a computer that is continuously driving the digital participant
out of the private sphere and into the public; a sense of potential
omnipotence frightens the user to become a mobile citizen. Cellphones,
PDAs, Blackberries, wireless laptops, removable USB devices, handheld
wireless video game systems like the PSP:
this is the arsenal of the tech-savvy individual with a sense
of civic duty. Steve
Mann/Cyberman has long realized the importance of mobility
in being a functioning member of our increasingly techno society
in his project to become a fully functional mobile media centre.
Slowly, we are becoming the free-moving cyborgs that rely on a
mediation of social interaction. We can carry our ability to alter
the world onto the bus, the subway - just as we can carry it with
us in a suicidal leap off of a skyscraper. The ability is there
for digital gadgetry and gaming devices to stand as a division
of our being. As the number of those willing to take on a fully
functioning cyberdentity increases, our world of flesh becomes
the thing of spectacle, presenting "itself simultaneously
as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification…The
spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation
among people mediated by images"4.
The wi-fi, mobile being is one which ceases to exist without that
mediation.
SLIDESHOW
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