Page 121 - Democracy and the Public Sphere
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116 Jürgen Habermas
mobile is something we use to achieve a communicative goal in
the most efficient way possible. Moreover, Myerson points out that
although we still conceive of person-to-person communication as
the core function of the mobile phone, corporations are continually
devising new ways to constitute it as a tool for interaction between
individuals and abstract systems or institutions: it threatens to
become a technology of ‘narrowcasting’, a bespoke push-and-pull
provider of information and entertainment services in the image of
the ‘me channel’.
But just as the telephone itself, since its nineteenth-century
inception, has been a site of contest between competing models of
communication (for example, the official discourses that promoted
its instrumental and business uses versus the feminised discourses
of chatter and ‘keeping in touch’, or historical examples of the
telephone being used as a broadcasting system for news or music), so
too the mobile phone is emerging as a yet more complex assemblage
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of contradictions, contestations and contingencies: the cultural
values of communicative economy in Finland, the birthplace of
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the mobile phone, versus the tropes of connectivity and phatic
communication that often accrue to it in other cultures (writing
this in New Zealand, I am currently surrounded by advertisements
for a new mobile phone service called ‘Motormouth’ whose tag
line is simply ‘blah, blah, blah, blah’ – the ‘system’ restlessly strives
to recuperate the inefficient and unruly lifeworld!); the uneven
popularity of text messaging and picture messaging across the world;
the relative failure, to date, of online information services (a pared
down Internet in the hand), which are continually touted as the
future for mobile phones: all these things suggest that the mobile
phone may not be as amenable to ‘systemic steering’ as either the
corporations or the cultural pessimists imagine. This is reinforced by
a variety of subterranean affections for the mobile phone on the part
of ‘flash mobs’, philanderers, football hooligans, criminal networks
and so on. Moreover, I think we would benefi t from more research
on the way mobile phones and other communications devices are
implicated in the boundary disputes between system and lifeworld and
not merely in a narrative of colonisation which frames the lifeworld
as mute victim.
How do we grasp the meaning of the digital citizen who trades the
relative serendipities and collective frames of reference of the radio
(one ‘system’) for the hyper-individualised abundance of the personal
MP3 player (another ‘system’)? How do we read the student who sits
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