book review

Sharing = Caring
review by David Senior

Me+++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City.
by William J. Mitchell

The reiterated themes of William J. Mitchell's work Me+++ identify the
overarching trend in digital technology of shrinking objects that
compose our capability of receiving and dispersing information, of a
capacity within communication techniques to blur former boundaries of
movement and vision. The book presents an impressive list of new
horizons in the development of techniques of communication, mobility
and information storage. The pattern is replayed for the reader in
various fields: of academic networks of digital reference, digital
accessories like cellular phones and wireless laptops, universal
access to GPS services and the compression of all these tools into
single handheld devices. The tone reflects an insurmountable tide
towards the merging of our tool set and the individual into an easily
accessible node within a comprehensive network architecture. Within
this architecture, the body and the techniques reflect an ambiguous
figure, one without former distinctions between where the line is
drawn between the tool and its user. This is a point however that has
been reached and reiterated consistently within the deluge of critical
writing on and around the philosophy of technology and our cyborg
condition. Me+++ simply attaches some more anecdotes on this narrative
of the contemporary person and the limitless personas of the body and
thought.

What Mitchell, academic director of MIT's Program in Media Arts and
Sciences, provides for the reader, is a consideration of the
technological world at the moment and also, allusions to the
trajectories of possible developments in the future. As he states, he
writes from the perspective "of a critically engaged designer whose
business it is to reflect, imagine and invent." The very nature of
this type of writing achieves its essential point by just attempting
to codify the moment in terms of the trends and trajectories of our
digital world. Already, this book, which was originally published in
2003, evokes an awkwardness that any projection in regards to the
future holds in the history of technology. The danger of writing
prognostications of a future present is the pace of change that
already has outstripped the writer's reflections of the state of the
art. The already obsolete condition mimics that of the objects
themselves, the constant production of debris in development of new
and better products, and also reflects the condition of the unexpected
in the function and dysfunction of our technology. Inevitably, the
approach to an object is flipped on its head by an innovative gesture,
an accidental move or a stubborn user. In fact, the most dynamic
condition of an object is in its role in events or practices that are
completely detached from any intention of a designer, by destabilizing
former configurations of orientation and function.

Consistently, there are depictions in the text of the body without
decisive limit, extended by the conditions of small and mobile
networked communication techniques. This is a decisive point that
should be understood in today's discourse on the body, and in
philosophical discourse in relation to technology and communication.
Users of these new techniques have begun to recognize the how deeply
these new spaces participate in our reflection of ourselves and the
map of our complicated contemporary environment. So, as Mitchell
writes emphatically of these networks, "Not only are these networks
essential to my physical survival, they also constitute and structure
my channels of perception and agency-my means of knowing and acting
upon the world…And they are as crucial to me as my neurons." Such a
strong admission of one's dependency on our mediatized setting
certainly stirs reflection on the degree to which Mitchell is correct
in his summation of this dependency. What is more alarming given such
statements is Mitchell's lack of a more decisive advocacy against the
forces of control in our digital milieu. Considering such an essential
relation to this architecture, it would seem fairly important to
seriously assert the dangers that are bound to the political and
economical control of access to these spaces. Often, Mitchell
positively references the figure of the nomad as the new condition of
our contemporary circumstances. This reference has been articulated
often enough to have become cliche, especially in regards to the
extent that Deleuze and Guttari's original work in Anti-Oedipus and A
Thousand Plateaus has been pasted on a whole menagerie of critical
thought and cultural studies discourses. In terms of Mitchell's use,
the figure of the nomad has no resonance as a persona of resistance.
The general characterization of a contemporary or future individual
empowered by the ability to gain quick information or access to larger
communication networks fits best with the desired qualities of
contemporary business models. This model of the mobile worker has
surfaced now in the advertising and promotion of business tools and
wireless technology as the fundamental necessity for success in the
global market.

Also, the accessories of mobility highlighted in Me+++ could easily be
connected to an extension of surveillance and integration in a
specific fixed order. Here perhaps we see a more rigorous relation to
the stakes of contemporary techniques of mobility. Is it more that we
are designing an increased order of surveillance and control through
the technology of communication, imaging and identification? It simply
takes a responsible look at certain militaristic origins of
technologies to relate these new techniques to various methodologies
of control and security. Central to any discussion in this regard is
the current research in biometrics and the implications of this new
horizon of biopolitical space. The consequences seem to be less an
instituted freedom of movement but more of hyper-mobilized condition
of security and zones of contained communication. The space of the
network extends out, but less in a capacity to surpass understood
borders, in a condition where we are all more intrinsically subject to
the biopolitics of contemporary society.

What then is the role of the designer in such a condition? Despite
some of his omissions in terms of the challenges which the designer
faces in the contemporary milieu, the effective message of Mitchell's
book is his interest in an ethic of cooperation in the production of
new network environments. The persistence of cooperation in this
environment directly opens the possibility of an innovative output of
creativity and an extension of ourselves in endless ways. The ethic
enforces an ambiguity of authorship as well as ceaseless plane of
collaboration. Such a method also makes obsolete the contemporary
phenomenon of intellectual property and the ability to own ideas. In
such a scenario, the possibility exists, in its most u-topic sense,
for unexpected openings and encounters that further complicate and
dislocate, permitting a particular kind of listening to our
surroundings and the potential for strange messengers to pronounce
themselves. In this way, the space of our networked surroundings truly
becomes a frontier space in which curiosity and questioning take
precedence over any obsession with security and the precise
articulation of our coordinates.

Sharing = Caring
review by David Senior

Me+++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City.
by William J. Mitchell

The reiterated themes of William J. Mitchell