The comfort of mobile media

Abstract

This debate article notes that there is currently a tendency to focus, understandably, upon what it is that mobile media do, that is to say their functionality. This piece argues that we need to open up our analysis to understand these devices as objects with which individuals may develop an attachment. The piece draws upon literature that uncovers the attachments that people create with everyday objects and suggests that mobile media devices, as prominent everyday devices that are intimately incorporated into routine bodily practices, need also to be thought of in these terms. Here it is argued that it is important that we don’t just think of these devices as portals onto virtual culture, but that we acknowledge that these objects also have a material connection with the owner. These personal attachments with everyday devices are yet to receive sustained attention, yet these connections are actually an important part of how mobile media have become such a prominent and embedded part of contemporary life. The aim of this article is to open up this additional dimension to the study of mobile media and to place it upon the collective analytical agenda for those researching new media forms.

Keywords

Artefacts everyday life materiality Mobile media personal attachments stuff

In his valuable if a little obscurest book The Parallax View, Slavoj Žižek (2006: 8), drawing upon some typically heavyweight philosophical sources, briefly works with the classical distinction between oikos, ‘the household organization’, and polis, ‘the city-state’. In this working Žižek is keen to emphasize the importance of understanding the spaces that exist between these two territories, ‘in the fragile spaces of exchange and circulation between them, a space which lacks any positive identity’ (Žižek, 2006: 8). This space, referred to as cogito, is ‘insubstantial in character’; he suggests that the:

cogito is not a substantial entity but a pure structural function, and empty place ... as such, it can emerge only in the interstices of substantial communal systems. The link between the emergence of the cogito and the disintegration and loss of substantial communal identities is therefore inherent. (Žižek, 2006: 8)

We might begin thinking about mobile media in relation to this vision of cogito, the ‘empty’ in-between spaces of everyday life that exist between the more clearly defined spaces of the home and public spaces of the city, town or even village. Mobile media are often, as Bull (2000, 2007) has found, used to occupy and negotiate these in-between empty spaces, to fill the voids that we encounter in our routines. We might, perhaps more significantly, imagine that mobile media also allow space to be redefined, transforming the clearly defined spaces of the oikos and the polis into the empty and less definable space of the cogito. Indeed, indirectly the existing research suggests exactly this process, the redefinition of communally defined space into the less stable and less communally owned space made available by immersion into the possibilities of mobile media (see for example Arkette, 2004; Beer, 2007; Bull, 2007; Thibaud, 2003). Perhaps this is why mobile media are often linked in academic and news media discourse to broader notions of collapsing social bonds and the endemic processes of isolation and individualization. This is of course open to challenge, we might point toward the need to think more carefully about the new social and cultural connections and experiences that mobile media afford. Against this backdrop, in this short debate article I would like to explore a set of these experiences and connections that so far have received little sustained attention in work on mobile media, this concerns the material experiences and attachments that are occurring where mobile media have become a part of routine everyday life. In short, I am suggesting a need to think about mobile media as objects that are intimately incorporated into routine bodily practices. I draw here upon a range of work that attempts to understand the relations between people and the objects that populate their lives so as to open up this dimension of mobile media. Contrary to much of the existing literature on mobile media, this article is not so much concerned with what mobile media can do or with the functions they perform, rather this article is concerned with thinking about mobile media as objects with which people may develop a personal attachment. This then is an article that explores material attachments to the mobile media themselves, the devices, as they are used to generate and negotiate cogito.

Unpacking my devices

We can use as a starting point Walter Benjamin’s (1999) well-known essay on the book collector. This piece, written in the 1930s, describes the relationship between the book collector and their books. Written as a short autobiographical reflection it describes the moment of re-attachment with the book collection as it is unpacked from the boxes that have been used to transport and store it (during the enforced movement around Europe that Benjamin experienced around that time). In this essay Benjamin emphasizes the importance of the material relations between the owner and the object. It is not, he suggests, about what is printed in the book it is about the object itself, it is the materiality of the object that holds importance for the collector. Here Benjamin provides an indication of his sense that it is not the functionality of the book, what it can do, that is of central importance in these relations. As Benjamin puts it, he is writing about a ‘relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value – that is their usefulness – but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate.’ (Benjamin, 1999: 62). In Benjamin’s account it is the book itself, the paper and cloth that provides the collector with a kind of material biography. These objects are central in cultivating their sense of self (for a more contemporary parallel to this argument see Shuker, 2004). The owner, Benjamin claims, can look into the object and see a history of ownership and link it to moments and experiences in their life. Benjamin observes that:

[o]ne only has to watch a collector handle the objects in his glass case. As he holds them in his hands, he seems to be seeing through them into their distant past as though inspired. (Benjamin, 1999: 62)

This then is an essay about the intimacy between people and objects that is definitive in shaping their understanding and identity.

I have used Benjamin’s essay elsewhere to consider the questions it raises about the new forms of collections of books and music and the like that are now held in virtual formats often on mobile devices (see Beer, 2008). I wondered what this transformation of cultural artefacts meant for the attachment with these objects that Benjamin described; I asked how we might think of this relationship where the materiality of the object had altered (for an overview of the broader debates about materiality and the problems of media afforded dematerialization see Brown, 2010 or Brighenti, 2010). Marjorie Kibby (2009) provided a strong empirically informed response to my questions suggesting that these previous personal attachments had simply shifted over to these new types of objects and formats. In response to my question about the consequences for Benjamin’s material biographies in an age of MP3 Kibby argues that, ‘[the] answer to that question is that the notion of attachment to the materiality of a collection needs to be reconfigured to make sense of the biography that music collections represent in the digital era’ (Kibby, 2009: 441). What I would like to do in this piece though is respond to this need not by focusing upon the new connections and attachments that are forming with the virtual formats through which culture is now exchanged, stored and consumed, rather what I would like to do here is actually shift the focus away from formats, informatization, digitalization and virtualization toward the objects that people hold in their hands, place in their pockets and bags and doc into their laptops and stereos – in short, the interfaces. With the sense that mobile media are going to form an increasing part of how we live, work and relax, it would seem that questioning the relations formed with these objects is highly pertinent. To open this issue up further I now shift my attention away from Benjamin toward some more recent literature that explores the relations between people and the ‘things’ and ‘stuff’ that populate their life-worlds.

Evocative objects, things and stuff

It is noticeable that the types of questions I am alluding to here, concerning the attachments people have with objects, are relatively well established in some branches of contemporary social science. This might well be a product of some broader overarching trends in social and cultural theory, those concerning the materiality of everyday life through the prisms of affect, post-humanism, actor-network theory (and assemblage theory) and mobilities, all provide notable examples of a broader sociological engagement with material worlds (for a list of some other literature on this topic see Turkle, 2007: 329). To give an example that relates more directly to the questions I have outlined here, two very similar books were published in 2007. Both of these collections bring together short think pieces by numerous authors who reflect upon their attachment with a particular object in their lives. The first, Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes’ Taking Things Seriously (2007), brings together contributions from journalists, artists and authors who reflect upon everyday objects including a rubber pig, a doll, a family portrait, a scrapbook and so on. The second book, Sherry Turkle’s MIT-Press published Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007), provides a similar collection of very short notes on everyday items such as a yellow raincoat, ballet slippers, a cello, a rolling pin and so on. These collections indicate some interest in understanding the part that objects play in defining everyday life. Indeed, the articles within these books are personal and intimate tales of the meanings that these objects have for their owners, accounts that resonate with the type of descriptions of the object and owner described by Benjamin. It should be noted that these two collections do not stand alone. William Davis King’s (2008) recent autobiographical account of his own collecting practices provides similar but more detailed insights into this intimacy, particularly as he reveals the way in which the collection shapes his lifestyle and personal relations. We can also see these types of engagements with the relations between objects, practices, biography and memory in recent edited collections on audio technologies (Bijsterveld and van Dijck, 2009) and object design (Costall and Dreier, 2006). There is little cross-pollination between new media work and this literature on the intimacy of everyday objects.

It is worthwhile focusing for a moment upon Turkle’s (2007) collection, not least because she provides a conceptual backdrop for the collection through the notion of ‘evocative objects’. For Turkle, by reflecting on these personal objects it is possible to open up some important social and cultural questions: she suggests that these objects can become things to ‘think with’. As Turkle puts it:

We find it familiar to consider objects as useful or aesthetic, as necessities or vain indulgences. We are on less familiar ground when we consider objects as companions to our emotional lives or as provocations of thought. The notion of evocative objects brings together these two less familiar ideas, underscoring the inseparability of thought and feeling in our relationships to things. (Turkle, 2007: 5)

Turkle’s position here is that by thinking of these as evocative objects we can illuminate the connections we have with these ordinary things, we can begin to uncover the type of things that Benjamin’s collector was seeing when looking at the objects held in the glass case. Like Benjamin, Turkle’s point is that the focus should not be upon ‘the object’s instrumental power – how fast the train travels or how fast the computer calculates – but on the object as a companion in life experience’ (Turkle, 2007: 5). The focus for Turkle should be upon understanding these evocative objects in terms of the attachment with the object rather than by focusing singularly upon what they do. Turkle (2007: 6) is keen in this to emphasize the prominence and importance of such objects as they stay with people through their life course and as ‘[we] live our lives in the middle of things’. Perhaps we can use this as a pointer toward an absence in the work on mobile media where the focus has tended to be almost exclusively upon ‘instrumental power’, with little attention to the ‘evocative object’ itself.

This interest in uncovering the broader part that various types of ordinary objects play in everyday life is perhaps explored in most detail in Daniel Miller’s recent work, and in particular in his important books The Comfort of Things (2008) and Stuff (2010). Both of these works explore the centrality of objects in people’s lives, as Miller (2010: 135) observes ‘things make people just as much as people make things’. He is careful to note though that his concern is with ‘how precisely things do in fact make people’ (Miller, 2010: 135). To obtain this precision he draws upon a rich body of past work and contemporary projects to provide empirical insights into the details of these relations – from what he describes as a social anthropological perspective. The content of The Comfort of Things for instance, is based upon detailed research into the homes of 30 people who live on one street. This book, according to its author, is ‘about how people express themselves through their possessions, and what these tell us about their lives.’ (Miller, 2008: 1). Echoing Turkle’s approach to these objects, Miller encourages the reader to ‘listen to these things’ so as to enable an exploration of the relationships ‘which flow constantly between persons and things’ (Miller, 2008: 6).

Clearly the impression generated by Miller’s work, and that of Benjamin and Turkle, is that objects are crucial in understanding everyday life, social relations and senses of self and emotion. Indeed, their claims toward this could not be any more emphatic and, it should be said, are backed up by a good deal of detail either through ethnographic accounts of people and their objects in Miller’s work, or through the autobiographical accounts of objects offered by the contributors to Turkle’s collection (foreshadowed by Benjamin’s own autobiographical essay). If we accept this compelling case then we can imagine that mobile media are likely to be implicated. These are the objects that are carried around, often on the person, held in the hand, checked repeatedly, that are associated with everyday routines, that are present through ordinary and extraordinary experiences, that develop a history with the owner. Mobile media are likely, in short, to be objects that become ‘evocative’ as they integrate into everyday life and as attachments are made with them. Miller (2008: 287) emphasizes the ‘centrality of material culture to relationships’, this suggests that objects are not only important to individuals but that they also play a part in fostering social relations. Mobile media are really quite instructive on this point, we have probably by now all seen the type of bonding that occurs around iPods, iPhones, MP3 players, iPads, netbooks and the innumerable other types of mobile devices; these objects provide grounds for shared tastes to be explored and connections to be created or perpetuated. Take for an earlier example the following passage from a description of a club night at which people could dock their mobile music devices with the PA system to enable them to act as the DJ (or MP3J as they were known):

Some carried the elaborate third generation models with the iconic white earphones. Others settled for scratched, faintly retro first-generation versions and wore subdued plugs instead of the white ones they dismiss as fashion statements. (Herbert, 2004)

In this journalist’s account of this club night we can see that the object itself is crucial to the relations within the club, it is not about what the device can do, they can all play music, it is about the type of device you have and the cachet, or, to call upon Bourdieu, the cultural capital, attached to particular devices (for more on the relation between fashion and mobile devices see Fortunati et al., 2008; Katz and Sugiyama, 2006). These objects then become central in shaping the interactions of the evening. The retro ageing device has, to return to Benjamin, the aura of its history etched upon it. This provides one instance of how we might connect work on mobile media with the type of work on everyday objects to which I have alluded.

Concluding thoughts

With the foregoing discussions in mind, the question we might begin to consider here concerns the nature of everyday attachments that individuals cultivate with mobile media devices that populate their lives. The suggestion is that we need to open up this area of study to look beyond what it is that these devices can do to consider them as ‘evocative objects’, that is to say to think of them as objects like any other that have an intimate relation with the owner – even if this is a short-lived and ephemeral connection that lasts only until they upgrade or move to another device. The engraving of iPods and iPhones is an interesting example here: a permanent etching is placed on a device that is clearly only intended to have a relatively short shelf-life. This process of personalization is one of the more visible indicators of an attachment to the object. We can also see the way that the device fits into a pocket is extracted and held, played with, checked, and returned to the familiar position within the pocket (for an example of this type of attachment in the case of mobile phones see Vincent, 2005). A cursory observation suggests that the devices themselves matter, they have a presence. What is more difficult to extract is how, to use Turkle’s terminology, ‘evocative’ these objects are. It is clear that the archives that they hold – which include archives of music, games, software apps, podcasts and the like – matter to people, we can see this clearly communicated in the empirical work of Bull (2007) or Kibby (2009) for instance, or we can always turn again to Benjamin. The question though is whether the medium becomes important, whether it is just a portal or if it actually has a presence in its own right. It is about whether attachments form with the interface itself as well as with the cultural archives it holds or accesses. At the moment we are seeing (or not seeing) mobile media as invisible or transparent portals onto virtual culture. Mobile media tend to exist in our formulations merely as windows. Given the range of evocative objects covered by Miller and others it would seem unlikely that these objects somehow exist without attachments, particularly as these are the very objects with which people are so frequently tactile and which are so embedded in their bodily routines.

The biggest problem we might face in extending this dimension to the study of mobile media is the separation of the object from what it does. This is clearly problematic. The attachments people create with these devices could well be a product of what it is that the device actually does. It might be that they find comfort in the object because it lets them call their family or because it lets them listen to music when on an uncomfortable train journey. Indeed, the chapter of Daniel Miller’s Stuff (2010) concerned with media focuses mainly on the connections and relations that these objects afford rather than connections with the object itself. It becomes clear in this chapter just how tough it is to remove function from an understanding of the object. We can also see some support for this and for the ongoing importance of material objects in people’s lives in a range of other contemporary work, particularly where people are faced with the immateriality of informational and digital cultural objects (as well as the aforementioned work of Kibby, for other examples see Brighenti, 2010; Magaudda, 2011; Ytre-Arne, 2011).

To return to Žižek’s point with which I opened this article, it would seem that the scale of presence of mobile media has further carved the need for a focus on ‘cogito’, the ‘empty’ spaces of everyday life. We need to understand how mobile devices are used to create or fill these spaces. These in-between spaces are not in fact empty spaces they are actually populated by the mobile devices that people carry with them. These objects mean something to people, they do things, but they are also objects themselves with a condensed and often ephemeral shared history with the owner. These in between spaces of everyday life are, as Žižek suggests, of great importance. To understand them we need to gain a clearer understanding of how mobile media of various sorts allow in-between and empty space to be layered on top of the immediate surroundings so as to ‘re-territorialize’ space (Thibaud, 2003). It is also crucial though that we understand the objects that adorn these in-between spaces, that ornament cogito, it is here that we need to turn to the objects themselves and develop an understanding of the personal attachments that are made with these everyday devices. What mobile media do matters, but so does the materiality of the device itself as it is integrated into the bodily practices and spaces of routine life. I have only really been suggestive here, but in broad terms there is the need to think beyond the functionality and usefulness of the devices that populate everyday life. There are a set of material interactions with actual objects that underpin our engagements with information, it is important that we do not overlook this dimension. An engagement with this wider literature on the importance of attachments with, as Miller puts it, ‘things’ and ‘stuff’ may provide us with possibilities for exploring these dimensions further.

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