William J. Mitchell‘s new book ME++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City is an extremely useful survey and discussion of new technologies, but (how do I put this) not an inspiring one. The book makes a powerful and exhaustive inventory of new network technologies, particularly wireless ones, and discusses how these technologies are changing everything from our sense of self to the way power works in our society. Mitchell is careful not to get too carried away, in the manner of so many futurologists: the devices and techniques he is writing about are not all commonly available yet today, but they are all grounded in current practices. That is to say, Mitchell extrapolates only to the extent that he describes the situation in which today’s bleeding-edge technology has become the norm, an everyday experience within the price range and technical know-how of the average consumer. (By this, he seems to mean anyone at the economic level of the inhabitants of North America, Western Europe, and Japan).
What’s especially good about Mitchell’s account is the way that he embeds his accounts of cell-phone texting or RFID chips or GPS systems in the history of human culture, technology, and architecture. Goggles that display hyperlinked data are not anything radically new, so much as they are continuous with a whole series of inventions, or of human tweakings of the environment, from the mastery of fire, to various forms of clothing, various means of writing (making symbolic marks), and various architectural programs. New technology is thereby demystified, and even its “virtual,” delocalizing components are grounded in a dialectic between the body and its surroundings. Mitchell is also frank and thoughtful about the dangers, as well as the advantages, of the new wireless digital technologies: he spends as much time talking about their potentials for surveillance and control, as he does about the new forms of freedom that they might open up. Rejecting both utopian fantasies and dystopian prophecies, Mitchell offers instead a sober calculus of possibilities and dangers.
Why, then, am I ultimately disappointed with this book (which is what I meant when I said I didn’t find it inspiring)? I think it is because Mitchell remains on the level of the catalogue, or listing of separate observations. He fails to do (and probably has no interest in doing) what Deleuze and Guattari define as the task of the philosopher, theorist, or intellectual: to create new concepts. He shows us how new conditions and new forms of life are emerging, conditions and forms for which our current patterns of thought are no longer adequate; but he doesn’t take cognizance of this inadequacy (not even in his own language) and he doesn’t even begin to think about how it might be remedied. The result is a kind of enforced blandness. I suppose that is better than your typical “gee-whiz” celebratory attitude, but it leaves me dissatisfied. Mitchell avoids corporate hucksterism over the effects of new media and new technologies, but only at the price of substituting a kind of bureaucratic, policy-wonk mentality.
Me++
William J. Mitchell‘s new book ME++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City is an extremely useful survey and discussion of new technologies, but (how do I put this) not an inspiring one. The book makes a powerful and exhaustive inventory of new network technologies, particularly wireless ones, and discusses how these technologies are changing everything from our sense of self to the way power works in our society. Mitchell is careful not to get too carried away, in the manner of so many futurologists: the devices and techniques he is writing about are not all commonly available yet today, but they are all grounded in current practices. That is to say, Mitchell extrapolates only to the extent that he describes the situation in which today’s bleeding-edge technology has become the norm, an everyday experience within the price range and technical know-how of the average consumer. (By this, he seems to mean anyone at the economic level of the inhabitants of North America, Western Europe, and Japan).
What’s especially good about Mitchell’s account is the way that he embeds his accounts of cell-phone texting or RFID chips or GPS systems in the history of human culture, technology, and architecture. Goggles that display hyperlinked data are not anything radically new, so much as they are continuous with a whole series of inventions, or of human tweakings of the environment, from the mastery of fire, to various forms of clothing, various means of writing (making symbolic marks), and various architectural programs. New technology is thereby demystified, and even its “virtual,” delocalizing components are grounded in a dialectic between the body and its surroundings. Mitchell is also frank and thoughtful about the dangers, as well as the advantages, of the new wireless digital technologies: he spends as much time talking about their potentials for surveillance and control, as he does about the new forms of freedom that they might open up. Rejecting both utopian fantasies and dystopian prophecies, Mitchell offers instead a sober calculus of possibilities and dangers.
Why, then, am I ultimately disappointed with this book (which is what I meant when I said I didn’t find it inspiring)? I think it is because Mitchell remains on the level of the catalogue, or listing of separate observations. He fails to do (and probably has no interest in doing) what Deleuze and Guattari define as the task of the philosopher, theorist, or intellectual: to create new concepts. He shows us how new conditions and new forms of life are emerging, conditions and forms for which our current patterns of thought are no longer adequate; but he doesn’t take cognizance of this inadequacy (not even in his own language) and he doesn’t even begin to think about how it might be remedied. The result is a kind of enforced blandness. I suppose that is better than your typical “gee-whiz” celebratory attitude, but it leaves me dissatisfied. Mitchell avoids corporate hucksterism over the effects of new media and new technologies, but only at the price of substituting a kind of bureaucratic, policy-wonk mentality.