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By
the ringing of their mobile phones, people are switched on and
off. As well as their mood, their mode is changed; from private
to business, from intimate to distant, with the topic their topos
is shifted. Merely their body remains within the proximate geographical
environment; unable to communicate with it as their attention
is drawn to the distant voice in their ear, they will be foreigners
in the place considered home just a second ago. The ringing of
their walkie-talkies is like a call to arms.
Not
accidentally a significant part of the messages communicated by
those devices is nothing but instructions: coordination, meeting
points, orders of lacking supplies from party rearguards. Apart
from that, there is a certain priority favoring the caller, one
can only circumvent by additional efforts (pushing extra buttons
etc.). To continue your contact in the (former) real world is not
the default operation. Every call on the mobile is a call from home--from
your new home.
As this
widespread form of human remote control becomes clear, the relevance
of virtuality can no longer be denied. Mobile phones let the public
sphere disappear in an unknown way. This time it is not taken charge
of by commercial signs but by private signals--not congested by
corporate advertisement messages but emptied of face-to-face chats.
Public places and parks are not a reservoir for gratis dialogues
any longer, as they become a graveyard for zombies whose souls are
having cheap calls. Dark cellar bars are the last place where you
can insult people with the risk of a slap-- not because of any sub-cultural
phone resistance, but because the connections are so bad.
Mobile
homes: anyone who has ever been visiting a trailer park where broken
tin huts are rooting knows that these cars never subscribed to their
given term. The possibility of movement integrated in their being
called mobile was soon broken down, as was the drive belt of their
engine. A museum of past ideas of mobility.
With
modern phones, the feeling of loneliness became portable and ubiquitous;
so did home. You don't need walls and a roof to feel at home--you
need someone who calls you while you're waiting for the bus. Feeling
near to your friends, wherever they might be geographically, you
begin to show the most intimate gestures in public. You don't need
an Immobilie, or Möbel, but you may need a comfortable pocket for
your phone.
Home
is where you lay your mobile down.
After
all, that's not a bad thing. Real life dialogue partners will sooner
or later get used to being just another knot in the extending personal
network. As long as you don't have sex with them there should be
no reason why their bodily presence enjoys priority. Some time they
will learn not to wait till you finished your phone call and they
will know that it is not meant to be disrespectful if you interrupt
your talk with them. Society will develop new ethics of communication;
allowing somebody to finish his sentence (just another rhetorical
measure established by the honorable masters of discourse) may not
be a part of it anymore. You'll switch your communication partners
like TV stations--and if you're lucky, you'll remember the best
ones.
Copyright
© 2001 Buster Truman. All Rights Reserved.
Buster Truman is a 28 year-old student of philosophy and media
design, currently living in Berlin, Germany.
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