The Present Extensive
The self itself does not amount to much but is it not isolated, it is trapped in a trammel of relationships that are more complex and mobile than ever. – this intense dependency has become expressed through the mobile phones. Lyotard
The relation between time, notions of the self and mobile phones are yielding some fascinating ideas that cross-reference cultural and urban theory and psychology.
The Present Extensive is a way of living in time that emerges as linked to the modern city. Jose Luis Pinillos coined the phrase urban psychopathology. ‘…with its incessant mobility and rapidity of its changes, the city situates its inhabitants in a permanent here and now, where references to yesterday and tomorrow vanish. Precisely because of this provisional character that prevails and because urban existence accentuates the ephemeral nature of all events, the technified city produces in those who live there a form of living in time that has been called the ‘present extensive’ (Pinillos 1977:239)
Mobile phones have promoted a form of living in time that consists in a lack of certainty about anything other than the present or the immediate future. Many users appear to be in a kind of perpetual state of preparation, planning appointments that are subsequently transferred to another date and then to another and finally never take place at all. What our society demands as regards commitments is flexibility – never before in history has punctuality been so important. We witness this with the rapidity with which calls are made to confirm ones attendances at meetings when one is stuck on a train. This follows with Virilio who believes that new conceptions of time is found everywhere today, in the precariousness of employment, short term contracts and long term unemployment, families broken and remade because of divorce etc (1999). There are two main consequences of this new temporal conception for the construction of self: fragmentation (loss of past as a context of current behaviour) and irresponsibility (loss of future as the consequence of actions).
‘Changes in the self resulting from the use of mobile phones’, Jose M.Garcia-Montes, Domingo Caballero-Munoz, Marino Perez-Alvarez
Media, Culture and society, 2006, v28(1) 67-82
2 Comments:
Hi Joanna,
Your an interesting person. Please dont excuse yourself for what you do best nor take advantage of it.
Fate will tell whether we keep in contact. Your art is in my life.
Alex Hayes
....another thing.
Never lock off comment. It annoys me no end when you espouse such academia and lock of your witnesses. I'm sure this was not your intent.
Alex
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