Postmodern morning musings

Morning in a middle-class urban home. At 5 a.m. the alarm on the mobile phone sounds. Hit the snooze. Eight minutes later (precisely, our lives are now programmable to the second) it rings again. Hit the snooze again, knowing that the next time is the last, and there is no escape from the break of day. At five sixteen just before the first beep assails your ear drums, you drag yourself out of bed and almost as a reflex flick the switch on the modem so that cyberspace opens up its multiple gateways into your home even before your eyelids unstick themselves from the night. The bedside light is still on in the teenage daughter's room, competing with the dull glow of the laptop screen saver, logged out of its last social space at 3 a.m. or thereabouts. As your dominant hand lifts the toothbrush the other checks messages on the smart phone.

Life's a seamless, continuous space that seems to respect no boundaries. You squeeze your personality into multiple tubes, emerging through many windows transformed in some way, retained in others. Every space takes on a kaleidoscopic quality, your self and its nature changing with each shake, or every stroke of the keyboard.

So this is what it means to live in a post-post modern world? Each moment of experience is separate, un-integrated at one level, but rooted to some, sometimes unreachable core, at the deepest level. We break our moments of living, dipping into a window of news, sending intimate text messages, responding to strategic and professional questions, playing a game of solitaire.... Our mobile phones and laptops hold all the bits of our lives together--or seem to--and so holding them we feel whole, and disconnected when left alone with ourselves, device-less.

Is it at all important, or relevant, to think about how technology interfaces and interferes with our lives, or does it no more make sense than wondering about the sun rising in the east? Most of us who live in homes permeated with technology cannot imagine life otherwise--it has acquired, in Neil Postman's words, a "mythical" quality. But that is a non-question. As one pundit said, "The point of studying technology is not to study the technology but to analyse and contest the governing ideology that determines its uses."

The ways in which we unpack and understand that "governing ideology" can range from the macro, in terms of policy analysis and infrastructure development, to the micro and the ultra-micro, in terms of how technologies work in our everyday lives, even in terms of thinking and expressing ourselves--to ourselves.

...so, having readied myself for the morning and dealt with my phone messages, and found my coordinates in this world (or my various gadgets have positioned me within them, GPS tracked, IP address logged), I try to turn myself to the questions of the mind, in the silence of the mind...

Logging off...for now!