Disciplined by Gadgets
I've been on a few domestic flights recently and I have realized that airports/airplanes are the NEW carceral spaces. Forced to watch bad movies, and page through the Sky Mall offerings because airlines have become cheaper and cheaper in their services and have no more reading materials with at least a wider array of advertorials, travellers are the new hostages...unable to refuse to take off your shoes or watch the latest romantic comedy, you think that you can protect yourself from the sensory assault -- by talking to your loved ones on your cell phone. Travel today is just so much time and space in which to be exposed to products and their various placements. Autonomy from the vacuity of the kiosks offering (anything resembling journalism was decidedly absent from such spaces), one has recourse to gadgets, which give travellers a wonderful sense of sovereignty! I'm listening to the my Ipod, tuning out CNN, and then I'm talking to my family, tuning out the airport ambience, which is all permitted, I'm writing emails to get a leg up on the next day of work -- everything in terms of connectivity is permitted except critical thinking.
3 Comments:
do you mean disciplined a) by the panoptic architecture / transient state of exception,
and b) in side-stepping the brunt of this and resorting to gadgets, disciplined by gadgets?
or are they the same? - I am still kind of hoping that one could claim gadgets as a kind of
opening up of the control-space architecture of low-rez sensurround...
gadgets get us right where we think we need to be sovereign-- with alterity, temporality -- and decision -- but what we get is neither otherness, time or choice.
I mean also "disciplined" by gadgets themselves -- they demand attention -- I think business used to be able to "space out" or there was more emptiness as they moved from deal to deal, but now, all that emptiness is potentially full -- of more work, and play. I don't know about the low-rez sensurround, but to me, it all seemed about being where one is not -- and who ever said that there was anything more to travel than business travel, but it just seems more that way than ever, at least between Newark and Orange County.
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