Mobile Devices

Our intimacy with ‘anywhere, anytime’ connectivity (Green, 2002), promised by mobile technologies forces us to acknowledge the ‘continual co-presence of both our physically real and digital self (Turkle 1995). ‘The self, attached to its devices, occupies a luminal space between the physical real and its digital lives on multiple screens’ (Turner 1969). The powerful lure of these devices is the opportunity that they offer for exploring identities (Turkle 1995). Websites such as Second Life provide what Bruckman (1992) describes as an ‘identity workshop,’ allowing you to reinvent yourself as you desire, recast your life and live out multiple aspects of self.

Hirst and Harrison (2007) claim that mobile devices are also contributing to changes in the process of social interaction. The blurred boundaries between double lives are evidence of a shifting motion of space. These devices are used as tools to engage simultaneously in work and leisure relationships despite distance or location (Green 2002). Individuals are becoming emotionally absent from those they are physically with, turning their focus online. It is becoming evident that more and more people are dong things like interrupting face-to-face conversations to send a text message or reply to a Facebook comment. In both our personal and professional lives, the connections that seem to matter the most are the ones to our devices. The importance and effectiveness of face-to-face conversation is being forgotten and we are developing increasingly intimate relationships with machines (Turkle 2008); personalised devices that know what we like, want and need (Hirst and Harrison 2007).

Ideas of what people now consider ‘public’ and ‘private’ are also changing with an increased desire for public spaces to provide an element of privacy where individuals are alone with their devices. Each person inhabits a private media bubble not wanting to be disturbed. When people have personal mobile phone conversations in public spaces what sustains their sense of intimacy is the presumption that those around them treat them not only as anonymous but close to disembodied (Turkle 2008). They are marked with a certain absence both emotionally and socially.

Mobile technology has become so embedded in our lives that we now live our lives through them. We form relationships, express feeling and continually develop our identity. They impact our daily lives so greatly that at times we have to question whether we’re too connected. Have we given up aspects of our physical lives in lure of another?

 

References

Bruckman, A. (1992). Identity workshop: Emergent social and psychological phenomena in text-based virtual reality. Unpublished article available at <http://mf.media.mit.edu/pubs/other/IdentityWorkshop.pdf>, MIT Media Laboratory, Cambridge, MA.

Green, N. 2002. ‘On the Move: Technology, Mobility, and the Mediation of Social Time and Space’ The Information Society, 18:28 1-292, 2002 United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis

Hirst, M. and Harrison, J. 2007. Communication and New Media: From Broadcast to Narrowcast, South Melbourne: Oxford

Turkle, S. 1995. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster

Turkle, S. 2008. ‘Always-On/Always-On-You: The Tethered Self’ in Katz, J. E. (ed) Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies, viewed 2^nd December 2013 <http://wed.mit.edu/sturkle/www/always-on%20always-on-you_the%20tethered%20self_st.pdf>

Turner, V. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Chicago: Aldine