Page 121 - Democracy and the Public Sphere
P. 121

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









                                                                                        23/8/05   09:36:12
                        Goode 02 chap04   116                                           23/8/05   09:36:12
                        Goode 02 chap04   116
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