The Technological Gaze

Introduction Bodies occupy their position in space, and this space has been commodified, shaped and framed. The personal wall of space and sound between two bodies can be carved out as two distinct entities by engaging the cognitive senses. Two people in the same room can be either separated or connected by technology. The recognition and perhaps the celebration of the body as a site of consumption has witnessed an array of technological and mobile artefacts designed to lure its cognitive senses away from the communal and into the personal. The personal space is a coveted commodity in which new technologies, innovative designs and convergence occur and coalesce. The inbuilt surveillance mechanisms within mobile technologies and the constant circulation of bodies nevertheless constitute new forms of gaze, consumption and surveillance which have wider implications for postmodern societies. This counter-gaze of the technologically connected bodies presents the potential for empowerment and connection with wider society, yet it inadvertently raises new conundrums in which the politics of gazing present new ethical and moral dilemmas for humanity. Our bodies as mobile entities have often posed new challenges for designers and innovators, and, in our increasingly mediated electronic world, technologies that were integrated into the hearth and home have become disembedded from the confines of this domestic setting to appropriate the mobile body as a site for locating new forms of consumption and communication. Traditional media such as radio and television in their heyday heralded the ability for families to come together and experience consumption as one entity. The decentring of technologies of entertainment and consumption from the domestic sites into the physical site of the body has meant new forms of configuration in design and convergence. Adorno prophesied that ‘we will conceive a series leading from the man who cannot work without the blare of the radio to the one who kills time and paralyses loneliness by filling his ears with the illusion of “being with” no matter what’ (78). The advent of the Walkman marked an era that sought to provide pleasure on the move while appropriating the body as a site for embedding technology (Hebdige). In crowded places and even in the domestic arrangement of the home, the self could seek private spaces of entertainment. The iPod as the descendant of the Walkman phenomenon celebrates both the body and movement while stressing the elements of individualisation and personalisation of content whereby the moving body can create a library of sounds and content unique to itself. Capitalist enterprises have recognised the criticism of mass reproduction levelled at the culture industries by emphasising the remaking of individuals through technology and have stressed the personalisation of technology on a mass scale. The personalisation of technologies has become a major marketing tool for mobile technologies. More importantly, many mobile technologies, such as the iPod, are designed to speak to other new media technologies and constitute part of a new media ecology in which individuals can customise their content and have the agency to transgress the boundaries between a producer and consumer. With the rise of mobile telephony and the convergence of technologies, portable gadgets morph into both communication and media devices. The current mobile phones assume a multitude of identities, delivering sound, text and images while connecting a moving body in a crowded space to virtual worlds and people beyond its immediate remit. The ability of mobile gadgets such as cell phones to interact with wider interactive technologies such as the Internet has provided new platforms for audiences and consumers to produce personal narratives, images, opinions and information. Images can be captured on the move and disseminated on a global and public platform such as the World Wide Web. Uploads and downloads symbolically construct the individual simultaneously as consumer and producer and as part of the audience in the postmodern age in which boundaries between categories are blurred and increasingly eroded. Mobile technologies are sites of double articulation where they are both a medium and a receptacle for content. In tandem with this, the emerging patterns of use of mobile technologies and their appropriation into the everyday life have consequences for the evolution of a post-surveillance society in which the omnipresent gaze is constructed through mobile telephony. More importantly, the links between mobile and new media technologies such as the Internet present new production and political economies where private content can be linked to a wider economy of information production and dissemination. Many of the debates about mainstream media and the Internet have concerned the ability of audiences to circumvent and renegotiate the gate-keeping models of media power. The power of the media, which Habermas referred to as a form of refeudalisation, conveys the entrenched and unchecked power of the media in contemporary societies. New media, while not completely reconfiguring the power structures of mainstream media, present new avenues to raise counter points. In the last decade, the mainstream media have had to integrate the occurrence of information and content on the Internet and in mobile technologies, and in view of this the links between mainstream media, new media, civilian journalism and narratives are increasingly evolving. It is in this present economy of information that the potential of mobile and interactive technologies and the personal gaze of the connected body need to be assessed. Personal Gaze and Event Construction Much of the recent literature on news construction has focused on the decline in traditional gate keeping and the rise in media-driven events, which have been facilitated by new communication technologies such as videophone and portable recording and transmission systems (Livingston & Bennet 364). The rise of soft news and infotainment (Patterson) in the mainstream media, the integration of personal narratives and the trivialisation of politics have meant that since the 1980s there has been an increasing reliance on ‘eyewitness’ accounts (Livingston & Bennet 370) to construct media reports. Event-driven news (Lawrence), unlike pseudo events (Boorstin) orchestrated by the media, includes spontaneous events such as natural disasters and terrorists attacks. Bennet and Livingston have argued that event-driven news is overtaking institutionally based news, particularly in the technologically charged environment of cable television international affairs news. In the weeks and months that followed the 9/11 attacks, there was an increased sharing of information, narratives and images through blogs (Brady). Blogs became a post-event discursive location for communion and sharing experiences, reiterating the fact that new discursive spheres (whether originating from mobile interactive technologies or from the Internet) will become integrated in event creation and memory construction in mediated societies. It signifies new media rituals in conveying global events where the telling of the story through the media gaze alone is incomplete and where the inclusion of the participatory gaze of the civilian becomes embedded in event creation. Mediated events are enacted and reconstructed not through mainstream media paradigms alone but also through new media platforms which enable individuals to contribute, embellish and perhaps even negate media accounts of global and local events. Technology in this sense has both increased the occurrence of traumatic acts and access to them (Zelizer 697). Our sense of the familiar and unfamiliar, community as well as otherness, can be increasingly mediated through mobile technologies where the banality of the everyday imposes new forms of connection and disconnection. Eric Paulos and Elizabeth Goodman moot the idea that, in the public urban spaces we inhabit, the individuals who affect us most are the ones that we repeatedly observe and yet do not directly interact with. Borrowing the term from sociologist Stanley Milgram, Paulos and Goodman argue that the mobile phone has increasingly divided people from co-located strangers within their community, because there is a tendency to ignore other people while reaching for the mobile phone. This dramatically decreases the opportunities for interaction beyond our social group. The incorporation of the private gaze into news production privileges the individual gaze, in which the media may not have been present to narrate events as they unfold. The act of bearing witness moves individuals from the personal act of ‘seeing’ to the adoption of a public stance by which they become a part of a collective working through trauma together (Zelizer 698). Barbie Zelizer contends that the ‘individual remains the lynchpin through which the upheaval and dislocation caused by trauma begin to be replaced by shared social meanings and a renewed sense of collective purpose’ (698). In the July 7 bombings in London, events on the fateful day were constructed through both individual narratives and digitised images. A posting on the BBC website gives an insight into the evolving and intrinsic relationship between event creation and mobile technologies: When tragedy strikes the news crews are not far behind and the attack on London transport network in July 2005 was no exception. However the photographers and journalists were there to record the aftermath, it was you (the reader) who sent in stills and videos of the moment disaster struck. In the aftermath of the July 7 bombings, the BBC received 20,000 written accounts via e-mail, 1,000 photos and 20 videos from citizens. The Tsunami disaster, the 7/7 bombings in July, the Madrid bombings and Hurricane Katrina br