Cellphone Ideomotor

Brandon writes:
As I imagine it, the aim of this Research Group is to cull meaning from Experience, from everyday life, in order to double its returns, to create a hypermeaning which is invested back into Experience itself. The ubiquity of Cellphones, if nothing else, guarantees a deep well of meaning and a deeper impress on our Experience, which means the rewards will be all the more hypermeaningful. I get the sense that Cellphones— or Mobile Phones, if you're flipping through Wikipedia— have changed social flocking patterns and personal behaviors in countless, unexamined ways, and I want to understand this switch-and-shift in my own behaviors, if maybe to overcome their drawbacks. Cellphones are also a technology; which means that we can import previous praise and denunciation of technnology— from Plato's hunches about the techne of writing to Heidegger's techno-wariness... to the more technocratic gospel of the modern West.

It also means that— as a technocrat myself— I'm eager to see where our Research might lead in actual cellphone modifications, or other experiments in mobile-phone customs and culture.

So what has changed? I think first off the shape of social space, the topology of social space. Once upon a time, a telephone number indicated a place with a changing cast— a topos, a fixed location. This topos, this place, had certain customs and expectations attached to it, like home, work, public telephones. A telephone number flagged a location, a location that was fixed in space. A telephone call mapped one fixed place onto another; it mapped one sphere of influence, agency, and responsibility onto another. And a set of customs related to that place, that locality— your Work number, for example— all got mapped as well.

Cellphones came along and collapsed our sense of location, locality, and fixity. Ran everything together. They also destroyed the partitions of space that came with locality— including all the good hiding places, excuses, privacy, and the customs associated with place. So for instance, now managers and undesirables can always reach you by phone, and you now need an excuse for not answering your phone, just as you once needed for ditching work. They create a compact little space, that you carry in your pocket, in which we are somehow all crammed in together sardinewise. This compact space also rivals the real space around you, for priority, influence, and interaction. It creates another sort of mental space, a brandnew 21st century Cartesian dualism. Cellphone calls border on a form of telepathy— especially with earpieces, God knows.


So if cellphones demolish the partitions of space we once counted on, we can erect new partitions in time, that is by phonetag and voicemail and things like that. Our interaction with The Unwanted is no longer buffered by stretches of space. We have to find new tricks. The question is not whether you're home— it's whether you are available. Email sits somewhere in between these two logics, having a topos (the computer) and a fledgling rival space (the internet); offering both the possibility for excuse as well as a meeting spot. Sometimes, we desperately want out of real space, an escape hatch into any other rival space that will have us. Girls waiting for the midnight bus, surrounded by leering, creeping, inebriated males, will leap into that compact rival space, just to avoid the undesirables at the bus-stop.
She opens the phone in order to leap into that rival space with her friends.

But since that rival space densely contains all our friends and loved ones (as well as a few foes, fiends, and burdens), the cellphone is anything but a neutral object. It is a pet. An electric pocket chipmunk, that squeaks and ekes, and must be fed and cared for. It mixes comfort and encumbrance. One glance at my cellphone reveals my endearment— and the urge to hold it in my hands. To coddle, almost. Cellphones are not like children though, not even infants. They are lowlier and much lower on the Chain of Being, despite densely representing our burgeoning contact lists. They are pets. Parrots. Hamsters. Microdogs. Hilton sisters, or neurotically wealthy widows in Rittenhouse, might jet around with a cellphone in one hand, and a pocket chihuahua in the other, occasionally confusing one rapport for the other.... And not without reason. I'm surprised, actually, at the lack of true personalization of cellphones— that no profiteers have steered cellphones into the Giga Pets paradigm yet. Such horizons, perhaps for us to explore.

Before I go any further though I'll ask what you think cellphones have done to social time and space, what kind of relationship we have with them, and maybe what class of actions we could do to screw with these ideas.