The Historical Trajectory of Mobile Media

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Adriane Stoner, whose focus is on the historical trajectory of mobile media development. There are three ideological themes which can be observed in the rise of all new media, as James Carey argued: capitalism, popular imagery, and universalism.

New media were often accompanied by the rise of a powerful capitalism – new media is economically powerful, and existing economic systems usually need to be reconstructed as a result of their emergency, as powerful new monopolies are naturalised. Popular imagery associated with new media points to the notion of the electronic sublime – the rise of a more intelligent society. Finally, universalism embodies the idea of a great brotherhood of humanity – new media as holding the potential for a global network connecting us all.

Is this also applicable to the rise of mobile media, then? Have mobile media led to a restructuring of government and business, to begin with? Adriane argues that they haven’t – while companies like Apple have emerged as immensely powerful, it does not have a monopoly on instant communications; it has not forced us to restructure.

Do the mobile media of today also hold the promise of the electronic sublime? Here, the answer is more likely to be yes – there is a strong religious undertone to the worship of Apple and Steve Jobs, for example, as well as of mobile devices as such; also, mobile media have freed us to be mobile, but have chained us to instant, constant connectivity.

This also provides an answer to the question of universalism: the more connected we become with our mobile devices, the more disconnected we are from our physical environment; life has been relocated from the offline to the online environment.

But overall, has our ongoing quest to eliminate time and space (which started with the telegraph) taken us away from physical connection? Physical reality has now grown increasingly mediated; as this pattern continues, is human interaction destined to become a parody of itself?