[csaa-forum] Fibreculture Journal 6 - Mobility, New Social Intensities, and the Coordinates of Digital Networks

[Andrew Murphie]

Fibreculture Journal - issue 6
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue6/index.html

"Mobility, New Social Intensities, and the Coordinates of Digital  
Networks"

Edited by Andrew Murphie, Larissa Hjorth, Gillian Fuller and Sandra  
Buckley


  From stirrups to satellites, the invention of new forms of  
technical mobility has always created new intensities within the  
social. Each invention has also required a new idea of what it might  
be to be human, along with new tensions as older cultural practices  
and social forms are challenged. The contemporary mobility of digital  
networks is no exception. This issue of the Fibreculture Journal is  
concerned with documenting, and beginning to think through, the new  
mobile intensities allowed by digital networks. "Intensity" here  
refers not just to the ubiquitous nature of mobile networks, or to  
the frequency of use of mobile communications. New intensities are  
like new forces erupting within the old - taking the social somewhere  
it has not perhaps been before. At the least, these intensities give  
established orders new energies to either resist or attempt to fold  
into established social practices and modes of thinking.

All of the articles in this issue deal with these new intensities.  
Much of this issue develops key ideas and documents new social  
practices involving mobile telephony. Dong-Hoo Lee documents the  
experiments with self-image and expression now allowed young Korean  
women by camera phones. Angel Lin affirms the continuation of older  
social practices amongst Hong Kong college students using SMS (in the  
use of SMS to maintain social ties with friends and family, for  
example). However, she also notes the increased possibility of  
political participation, and some interesting shifts concerning  
biligual textual practices - perhaps even a specific emerging  
bilingual identity within the community of SMS users. Lin also finds  
that there are gender differences concerning the way that young  
people in Hong Kong use mobiles (males tend to use SMS to meet  
females and new friends, for example). Lin wonders if, however, this  
will lead males into more 'social grooming' via mobile  
communications. This seems to be the case in the study of Norwegian  
young people, provided by Lin Prøitz. She finds a surprising amount  
of gender mobility within the frame of SMSing, even when the rhetoric  
outside of this frame maintains reasonably strict concepts of  
gendered behaviours. Lee, Lin and Prøitz all outline the role of  
desire in promoting proficiency and subtleties within SMS use.

Judith Nicholson gives an extensive account of the brief but  
influential 'flash mob' phenomenon, at the same time describing the  
political potential of mobile networks in terms of new "mobs". Here  
Nicholson draws attention to the use of mobile phones to coordinate  
the political momentum in the Spanish election of 2004, echoing  
1981's 'night of the transistors'. Larissa Hjorth argues for the  
enfolding of older forms of communication within SMS and MMS use.  
Specifically she contemplates the shifting fragile intensities of the  
border between public and private in both SMS/MMS and the postcard.  
If there are new intensities of intimacy to be found in mobile  
networks, they are often mutations of older intensities.

Several articles move beyond mobile telephony, to discuss broader  
issues regarding networked mobility. Scott Sharpe, Maria Hynes and  
Robert Fagan consider the Internet as a forum for coordinating  
resistance to globalisation. As they point out, the Internet is  
already compromised as such a forum, as it is itself the forum of  
globalisation par excellence. They suggest rethinking what is  
possible in such a context. They give a detailed analysis of an older- 
style approach, that of the IUF 'superunion' educational web site,  
and a newer approach, that of activists, the Yes Men. In a surprising  
challenge to much analysis of globalisation and its discontents,  
Sharpe, Hynes and Fagan turn to Gilles Deleuze's analysis of  
masochism to point out the limits of the IUF approach. Rather than  
buy into the hegemony of representations as outlines by global powers  
(and some of their opponents), they argue for a humorous creation of  
new possibilities via the Internet. The latter involves an active  
seeking after new, more creative modes of thought, via which to nudge  
the new network intensities away from the monolithic nature of global  
Capital.

Nearly all of the articles in this issue are as contemplative and  
they are descriptive. The final three articles are centrally  
concerned with a thinking through of mobile intensities. Ingrid  
Richardson poses the concept of the 'mobile technosoma' - a return to  
thinking through the new kinds of bodily intensity associated with  
new technical intensities, and both bodily and technical intensities  
together. In the process she argues for a new medium specificity. Far  
from a convergence of media, Richardson comments that new mobile  
media forms, and their specific embodied contexts, require more in  
the way of specific analyses of their divergences.

Notions of stability, identity and place keep recurring in the  
discussion of convergent mobile media. Mobility, in particular the  
tactility and telepresence of mobile telephony, brings about an  
intense focus on the specificity of place and bodies. 'Where are you,  
now?' seems to be a refrain for many authors in this issue. The  
expansive yet normalising architecture of networks produces  
paradoxically an ethography of innovation and intimacy as shown in  
the four qualitative case studies from Seoul (Lee), Hong Kong (Lin),  
Melbourne (Hjorth) and Norway (Prøitz). In a delicately argued  
article grappling with this new sense of place, Rowan Wilken  
discusses a sense of place profoundly transformed by mobile networks,  
but not completely dissolved into them. Wilken points out that we  
simply cannot do without place, that place has always been a complex  
experience, and that, although there is no doubt that mobile networks  
transform place, this only makes it the more urgent to consider a new  
concept of mobile place - what he calls 'mobilitis loci'.This new  
place - a shifting place, a more intense and uncertain place,  
requires a new and more subtle politics - a central theme in many  
articles in this issue. This new politics of place is one that will  
have to consider the mutually infolding of virtual and actual at  
every moment of mobility. Wilken turns to some architectural/media  
experiments emerging from the events of the 1960s, such as those of  
the group Ant Farm, in order to give such infolding some historical  
context.

Felicity Colman and Christian McCrea take all these questions - very  
old and very new technics, new intensities and new fragmentation, new  
relations, the infinite deferral of networks and the way this  
deferral ties everything into a web - in the direction of what they  
call the 'digital maypole'. For Colman and McCrea, 'the maypole  
expresses the network’s torsion balance chart of power. The maypole  
topology is order through rhythmic tension and torsion, and in this  
sense its continuous binding of power makes the concept the  
paradoxical apostate of the network’s labyrinthine structure. The  
instinctual and biological ties of the etymological maypole enable us  
to focus upon specific power combinations of the network’s  
prescience'. There could perhaps be no better description of the  
problems and possibilities given to us by new mobile intensities,  
whether for those who are trying to mediate the shifts in social  
practices and cultural cohensions occasioned by mobility, or those  
attempting merely to analyse them.

We hope that it will be noted that there is a mix of approaches in  
this issue. In particular, the articles here range from the purely  
speculative to the mainly empirical. We are very happy that things  
have turned out this way. We began with a commitment to sparking  
conversation between different modes of analysis and response to  
these important issues. Such diverse studies exemplify the kinds of  
methodological constellations gathering around mobile phone use - and  
perhaps as importantly, examine the new relations between new, more  
mobile social intensities (such as biligualism in Hong Kong, gender  
fluidity in Norway) and mobile technologies as engaged with these  
intensities.


ARTICLES

"Flash! Mobs in the Age of Mobile Connectivity"
Judith A. Nicholson

"Gendered, Bilingual Communication Practices: Mobile text-messaging  
among Hong Kong College Students"
Angel Lin

"Mobile Technosoma: some phenomenological reflections on itinerant  
media devices"
Ingrid Richardson

"Beat me, Whip me, Spank me, Just Make it Right Again: beyond the  
didactic masochism of global resistance"
Scott Sharpe, Maria Hynes & Robert Fagan

"Gestures Towards the Digital Maypole"
Felicity Colman & Christian McCrea

"Locating Mobility: Practices of co-presence and the persistence of  
the postal metaphor in SMS/ MMS mobile phone customization in Melbourne"
Larissa Hjorth

"From Stabilitas Loci to Mobilitas Loci: Networked Mobility and the  
Transformation of Place"
Rowan Wilken

"Cute Boys or Game Boys? The Embodiment of Femininity and Masculinity  
in Young Norwegians’ Text Message Love-Projects"
Lin Prøitz

"Women's Creation of Camera Phone Culture"
Dong-Hoo Lee


http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue6/index.html

--
"I thought I had reached port; but I seemed to be cast
back again into the open sea" (Deleuze and Guattari, after Leibniz)

Dr Andrew Murphie - Senior Lecturer
School of Media, Film and Theatre, University of New South Wales,  
Sydney, Australia, 2052
web:http://media.arts.unsw.edu.au/andrewmurphie/mysite/index.html
fax:612 93856812 tlf:612 93855548 email: a.murphie at unsw.edu.au
room 311H, Webster Building


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