Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005)
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I Connect Therefore I Am: Connectivity and Networking in Bodies, Technologies, Communities, and Selves / Anthony Lambert
<1> The notion of connection refers to both metaphorical and material practices informing our understandings of the flows of energy and information within human bodies, communities, geographies, and technological networks. Cranny-Francis offers a definition of connection which accounts for the term's significance in the contexts of both Cultural Studies and multimedia literacy:
It refers to the ways in which texts generate meanings through their relationship with other texts, to the development of multimedia technologies that are characterized by their connectivity (the web, the net), and to the ways in which meanings are generated crucially by the connection between texts and their users. (Cranny-Francis, forthcoming)
Connecting demonstrates in a very real sense the ways in which human "being", culture and technology cannot be understood separately, but as always bound up with each other. This paper explores the ways in which our culturally mediated understandings of human selfhood, materiality and community shape the development and enactment of technological connection and connectivity. Connections, both inside and outside of our bodies, involve growth, existence and functionality on the one hand whilst simultaneously impacting on the production of subjectivity on the other. Mapping bodies, movement and systems of exchange foregrounds the centrality of connection to human life. Connection is about people and meanings. Identifying the inseparable flows and networks of both developing technologies and developing selves can help to productively explore the meanings and importance of connection and connectivity.
<2> To speak of connection in these terms is to ask direct questions of the notion of physical existence. William J. Mitchell (5) notes the contemporary "shift from a world structured by boundaries and enclosures to a world dominated, at every scale, by connections, networks and flows." Processes of human identification and human movement are "freed up", amplified and complicated by evolving forms of connection.
<3> Particularly in an urban sense (as "networked" citizens), Mitchell argues that humans have become "spatially extended cyborgs" (39) and "electronic nomads" (57). Like Hayle's posthuman subjects and Harraway's feminist "recoding" of the technoscientific self, Mitchell's futurist incursions are marked by a reliance on the notion of biological materiality, its relationship to and its embodiment of networked connection. He dramatises this relationship thus: "My biological body meshes with the city: the city itself has become not only the domain of my networked cognitive system, but also — and crucially — the spatial and material embodiment of that system. (Mitchell 20). It is certainly not my intention to tease out what Haraway (152) would call the "leaky distinctions" between human and machine, but to rest productively on the corporeal side of the posthumanist equation. Hayle (4) is instructive when she argues that "the construction of the posthuman does not require the subject to be a literal cyborg", that it is about "the construction of subjectivity, not the presence of non-biological components." The body is a series of connections (not necessarily technological or even physical though we shall see that these are extremely important ones). In short it exists and develops, not as an originary model of connectivity, but a highly influential "networked system" whose mechanics are given meaning through cultural processes.
<4> So connection returns us to the body, or at least an idea of the body and what it does. If someone were to ask you to recall your first moment of connection, what would it be? Would it be emotional? Or would you be thinking about your earliest memory of plugging in a toaster or a TV? The first time you used a computer? Maybe you're thinking of a time much earlier than this when you were plugged into something quite fleshy but not unlike the other things you now plug into so that your daily existence can function. Our first connection via umbilical cords and placentas is the very means by which early life is sustained — connection is from the outset a defining feature of what it means to exist, to develop, to grow and to survive. Studies have routinely suggested that our development as such is not wholly determined by the connection that enables blood, hormones and nutrients to feed growing foetuses in the womb, but that even then we've already begun to develop connections to forces and environmental factors (including technology) that exist outside the amniotic sac and the mother's body. Rather than understanding connection as "attachment behaviour" found in the work of theorists such as Bowlby, I want to suggest a provocation involving the body as a constantly changing network, ever engaging with multiple conceptual and material flows of acculturated sensation and information. Indeed for some babies, the connection with technology is what allowed them to be in the uterus in the first place.
<5> In a developmental context we can begin to talk further about the human body as a series of networked connections as in bones and joints which connect throughout our bodies within the musculo-skeletal system and circulatory systems such as the cardiovascular system — a series of arteries and veins. Arteries take blood away from the heart to the organs and tissues and veins return blood to the heart from the organs and tissues. Like our multimedia connections there are flows of energy and information. The flow of blood through our arteries and veins also engages a process of filtering and returning in markedly similar ways to our online connectivity, where the exchange of bits and bites that flows is sometimes blocked or filtered as well.
<6> Ironically perhaps, it is our ability to connect with technology exterior to our bodies that enables us to see the circulatory systems within it. There are a range of technological devices that help us to investigate the body — from x-rays to ultra-sounds, remote operations, simulated medical procedures, and tiny cameras that can be travel internally. Some devices even identify human veins using light patterns which are then converted into digital information and reconstructed within the computer environment. Bodies and computers become parallel and overlapping systems of connectivity. By plugging into technology we are able to connect more readily with the metaphysical human self.
<7> This mapping of the internal connections of the human body can be extended beyond the individual to the ways we map, mark and trace our connection with other human beings. One obvious example of this is the family tree, which, like the veins in our bodies, is based on a system of bloodlines, of complex patterns of connection based on genealogical relationships. And it's no accident that the symbol of a tree becomes a powerful metaphor for the historical and familial bonds shared by generations of people. In the Old Testament of the Bible the tree held knowledge. If you look at the branches and leaves of a tree, you see veins and extensions, not unlike those in our bodies. So in making connections with the development of our families and relatives over time, we begin to see the historical nature of human connection, and we see also the texts we develop in order to help us articulate what it means to be connected to people in social and biological senses. The tree's roots extend deep into the earth beneath it. The leaves and branches absorb moisture and oxygen taking nutrients down into the roots as they grow and extend. This kind of connection is indeed about data and history, but it shows that their use is never entirely objective — it is a politicised way of anchoring our place in the world as well as charting growth in personal and collective contexts.
<8> So connection is about growth, identity and history. Technology is often positioned in terms of its capacity to satisfy the human need for connection with other people. As technology has developed, the major commercial producers of technology have used their understandings of identity and growth to promote themselves. The slogan for Nokia's range of communication devices is "connecting people." Connection becomes synonymous with the latest technology and the latest programs that can best serve the variety of connections we need to make. Programs are the way we connect with computers and connect with other people. If you think of most contemporary processing systems and applications, they create histories of your computer activity — these are histories of connection and connectivity. What websites have you visited? What documents have you accessed? What downloads have you watched or listened to? What were the last ten calls you received on your mobile?
<9> Aside from cellular phones, memory cards, gaming, and the Internet we see the role of software in our human-technological relationships. We use the programs that seem to make the best sense for the kinds of connections we want to make. Do I need to compose a formal letter? A business spreadsheet or economic report? Or do I want to map my family tree? Hence with programs such as Family Treemaker 2005 one can create a family tree online. You can scan databases and you can enter information in a way that formats and arranges the development of your family tree. You can then search or expand these details as you need to. Your connections with the past and the future are there at your fingertips. It looks pretty much like a standard windows program and it is — the producers keep upgrading the versions with new features. So the software and its constant redevelopment can be seen as a way of mapping human connection which changes as technology advances, but also as the human need for faster more reliable connection seems to become more pressing. This is a point that I will return to later.
<10> Whilst we cannot divorce the notion of mapping from its connections to discourses of colonialism, science and commercialism, we can see that this mapping is also about connections and about enabling human beings to reach each other. Roads have always been important in this sense as they're primarily designed with human access and the transportation of people, goods and services in mind. This does not mean that we can divorce space from its relationship to power or profit, but it does demonstrate a very real, material and ongoing means by which human connection takes place. We have always in some way relied on spatial pathways to allow the flow of information or services between groups of people — whether this is a track through the jungle or a high-speed rail line. We've come a long way since the days of town criers and messages taken on horseback from one community to another. Indeed a defining feature of modernism was the development of the car and the roads all over the world on which they are used. Now we have complex highway systems that can take us just about anywhere. We can see why the "super-highway" metaphor so often used in IT is such an effective one, as traffic, both material and conceptual, is more dense and more active now than in other time in human history.
<11> But we cannot have such connection it seems without organization and planning. We need to schedule and monitor the flow of traffic, and by association the rhythm of public travel and public means of connection. I'm talking here about the development of networks. As Mitchell has said many times, networks and networking are everywhere in our lives. They make our everyday worlds work if you like: phone networks, energy networks and so on. The rail network is perhaps an even better example than roads of the modernist gridlocking of human behaviour. It's not just the faster transport which affects human subjectivity, as we see historically with the development of the steam train and the automobile. It's the public governance and administration of human movement and connection within a given framework. So whilst we are free to travel and connect with places and people (as we are on the Internet), that connection is bound by particular discourses of public organization. Further to this, you cannot get off a train whenever you want to (if you do it could be messy) and you cannot make the trains run when you want to (and believe me I've tried). So networks are the systems through which material and conceptual connectivity is managed.
<12> To return to my earlier examples of the human body and computerised technology, the idea of connection is played out in both spheres through systems of circulation. We could also say that in both cases connection is made possible through the systemic governance of networks and networking protocols. Without labouring metaphorical connections between brains and servers or hearts and hard drives (or vice versa), it serves to think about what happens behind the exteriors of bodies and technologies. Not many people spend time wondering what a large server looks like or even pondering exactly what is inside the computer we use. Do we ever even think about the larger processes involved when we use communication devices or networking technologies? As we connect with other people and with technology we usually concern ourselves with the "front end" so to speak. By beginning to think more profoundly about the systems involved in the connections we make, we can also begin to think more explicitly about the meanings involved in our relationships with technology, and more importantly, the social context in which these connections take place.
<13> As such the ideas of flow, circulation, filtering and recycling take on an added significance. Think of sewage systems as the ultimate example. As Mitchell (par 2) has often pointed out, the similarities between digital domains and such processes are important and obvious ones:
These infrastructures all serve the fundamental purpose of distributing resources over wider areas, and therefore of reducing or removing previous locational dependencies among human activities. When a village has only one well, everyone has to go to a central location to get water, and dwellings must be located within comfortable water-carrying distance. But when a piped water supply system is put in, the need to go to that central location is eliminated, drinking and bathing become activities that can take place anywhere, and dwellings can be scattered over a far wider area.
In terms of access and the distribution of resources networks such as sewage systems are crucial to the daily functioning of built up human environments. Every day in Sydney for instance the sewage from four million and sixty-seven people gets pumped out from one million, five hundred and ninety-two thousand properties (Connell Wagner P/L 2). Again, the network is not solely about the decentralising of supplies and processes. Just like the human body, stuff goes into it, gets filtered, some of it goes out the other end, but the useful stuff gets incorporated back into the system and keeps it going. So whilst modern existence can be seen to happen anywhere, these connections also reassert and remake ideas of community and human bonds. To think of a toilet as a connection to the world at large might seem a little weird, but that's exactly what it is — and it connects homes to a very complex circulatory system of which flow and filtering are the key components. Each home then is another point of connection in a series of much larger networks of energy, information and activity.
<14> The electricity grid is another example of this, with hundreds of thousands of wires, cables and substations taking power over and underground across the country, literally "connecting" all of us in some way. When I was researching this paper I went in search of information about Sydney's electricity grid and was referred to the recent case in Australia of a Sydney man who had been arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist with connections to Al-Quaeda. Aerial photos of Sydney were found in his possession with writings and maps relating to the national electricity grids and other utilities. This in itself helps us to make some interesting observations about the nature of networked connection, particularly with respect to the post September 11 political climate. If we make our points of connection visible, are we then as city, state or nation exposing our functional systems in a way that renders us vulnerable? And what is the fear about? Why are we so scared that someone may turn out the lights, pull out the plugs or log us off? We know why we need the sewage system so much, but for a whole range of reasons, from the personal to the social, economic and the political, our networks of connection are often the most valuable things we possess.
<15> Of course this is not the first time in recent memory that we have lived in fear of being disconnected. Most people will recall the New Year's Eve at the turn of the millennium. At the time people all over the world were hoarding batteries, band-aids, candles, flashlights and tinned food. There was strong feeling in many sectors that all the computers would shut down because they wouldn't be able to cope with the 00 in 2000. This quickly became known as the Y2K bug or virus. At the same time software companies, programmers and technicians set about making sure everyone's systems were Y2K ready, and making a fortune whilst they were doing it. The fear in itself invoked age-old mythologies about the end of the world and gave religious cults the chance to enact rituals based on obscure prophecies. Even the sceptics among us kept a couple of candles in the back of the cupboard just in case. The cultural context for this kind of thinking is always interesting for the particular texts it produces, and the 2000 Tom Hanks film Cast Away is reflective of the millennial fear of disconnection — the loss of our connection with technology and hence with other people. In short, the question is posed: What happens when we lose all connection with the world we know?
<16> In this film Hanks plays Chuck Nolands, a manager of operations for Fed-Ex, the American international courier company. When the plane he is on crashes into the ocean somewhere near the Cook Islands, he is stranded on an island for almost five years. In that time he learns to survive but has to deal physically and psychologically with being disconnected from the world in every sense (including his fiancée Kelly who thinks he is dead and marries someone else). He finds a volleyball in a parcel and names it Wilson, talking to it as if it were human. In one scene he and Wilson have built a raft to escape the island. Wilson falls off and Chuck loses the only point of connection he has, even though it is a purely imaginary one. A freight ship eventually rescues Chuck and he returns to America. The world has continued without him. His friends even had a funeral for him. In effect he has to begin again, but before he takes off into his future he delivers a package that he has kept with him through the whole ordeal.
<17> Cast Away can be seen to reflect fears of millennial disconnection and subsequent isolation. It is about the loss of technological and human connection which triggers creative responses to isolation and displacement. The main character is a courier, responsible for the flow of information between people. He returns to fulfil his role as an agent of connection at the end of the film, restoring order to the diegetic world. The film dramatises our very real fears of disconnection, but also seems to be saying that connection is ultimately a human capacity in spite of the processes we use to enact it. Therefore, when connection is disrupted in a major way, as many thought would happen with the changeover to 2000, we have it in us to begin again and to build new connections in an ever-changing world.
<18> In some ways you could read Cast Away as a tale of escape from the ties that bind us to systems, technologies, and other people, though the character's desperation to get home seems to tell us otherwise. Of course it's not that we want to be physically plugged into our worlds — indeed The Matrix seems to be telling us that we need to find ways to unplug ourselves from the shared illusions and systems of control that networked connections seem to represent. We want the convenience and functionality that our world affords, but we don't want the spatially and physically problematic "baggage" of cables and wires that chain us to communications and technological systems of connection.
<19> Hence we have moved steadily towards the portable and the wireless. Look at the development of "older" battery operated technology, transistor radios, video cameras, mobile phones and even remote controls that we use for a range of devices. We've seen ads in recent times for mobile offices with business people doing their work by the beach or at the edge of a cliff. An interesting example is the wireless computer and phone network recently installed in London's Southbank University. Wireless connection is evolving at both the level of the network and the individual user. I have a cordless mouse and a cordless keyboard in my office. My mobile phone has blue-tooth technology that enables me and my partner to compete against each other in games on our handsets. We video-call each other when the network conditions are right. We are simultaneously being freed from our connections in an environmental/physical sense, but at the same time we're able to mange more connections than ever before.
<20> This is in part because both wireless technology (and the refiguring of existing telephone networks in terms of a shift from old wiring to optic fibre) is as much about speed and multiple connections as it is about the liberation from cumbersome technological modes of connection. Statistics from American company The Yankee Group report that more than 23 million homes in the USA now use high-speed broadband connections (Anderson, online). They are either using cable connections or digital subscriber lines (DSL) to connect their homes to the world outside of it. The same applies here in Australia, where you can have your Internet, home phone and television services all using the same point of connection at the same time and without interruption to the other services.
<21> The commercial monopoly of these points of connection notwithstanding, we can isolate two dominant features of these processes: speed and multiplicity. Speed is an obvious and important cultural aspect of the way we organise social space and social interaction. This is no less true of the idea of connection. Gone are the days when you would have to wait ten seconds for the echo of voices to stop before you could speak to someone on an overseas telephone call. No longer do you need to go and make a cup of tea whilst you're waiting for your home page to load on your pc.
<22> This fits in with the seemingly countless number of discussions that focus on the relationship between technology and subjectivity — doing things faster makes us faster social subjects. Following on from this, multiple simultaneous connections speak to our post-industrialist subjectivity as we engage multiple literacies at the same time. If someone calls me at home and I'm on the Internet, I simply put him or her on speakerphone and keep surfing the web on my laptop. More than likely I have the television or the radio on as well. Never mind the electricity I'm using or the water pumping through my plumbing and sewage systems, not to mention the numerous physiological systems at play whilst I'm breathing, sitting, communicating, working, watching, and listening....
<23> Just as I'm engaging in multiple connections, I'm also inhabiting multiple spaces. Whilst this multiplicity and fragmentation of postmodern subjectivity is well documented in Mitchell, Hayle and Haraway, Foucault's (1986) notion of heterotopic space (as sites of relationships that are always multiple) helps to account for some of the ways we inhabit so-called "real" space, network space, web space, and cyberspace at the same time. We crossover between physical/material spaces and conceptual spaces, with the ability to make multiple connections within each. For the most part we do this without even registering the complexity of what we're doing, or the elaborate sets of relationships we invoke with each connection that we make.
<24> And where are these connections taking us? Would it be possible to actually measure in physical or geographical terms the connections we make through Information Technology? Computer networks are generally made up of three characteristics: nodes, edges and information exchange. What this means is that websites are seldom about one on one connections and that you can be engaging informational aspects of a number of domains at the same time. Shiode tells us:
the geographic location of servers is less significant, and the spatial order is dependent on arbitrary hyperlinks. In this sense, the Web space is a topological world, virtually free from any constraints on distance or direction in the conventional terms. The most decisive factors are the number of hops and the overall accessibility to the relevant information. (5)
Shiode and Dodge overlaid an atlas with the connectivity of global domains illustrating the virtual distance from a .com site placed in the centre of the Atlantic Ocean. They did this with respect to the number of hops that each link enabled. What they found was:
Assuming that the size of each domain reflects the amount of Web resource within its corresponding country.... It is clear from the map that the majority of the links are found amongst the more developed countries...it is perhaps reasonable to conclude that the distribution of Web domains and their links broadly reflects existing economic activity patterns, despite the difference in the distribution pattern of population and Web services (Shiode and Batty in Shiode 6).
If this were the case it would stand to reason that those areas of the world that seem to be most connected would be the ones with the most money.
<25> If we look at the figures that calculate the number of Internet users by geographic region in 2004 (Wheeler, par 5), this hypothesis generally bears out.
Internet Users by Region 2004
World Total 605.60 Million Africa (5 million of which in South Africa) 6.31 Million Asia/Pacific 187.24 Million Europe 190.91 Million Middle East (2.5 million of which are in Israel) 5.12 Million Canada & USA 182.67 Million Latin America 33.35 Million
We can see that the majority of users are located in the Asia/Pacific (which includes Australia), Canada/USA and Europe. All of these are huge areas of the world with large collective populations (Asia especially) and generally large combined economies (though it does serve to think about where the poorer countries in Asia may fit into all of this). One question we should ask is who is the least connected in terms of these figures? The least connected areas of the world are Africa (and most users are in South Africa) and the Middle East (and most users are in Israel). We know that African countries are highly populated and very poor. We know that resources and wealth of the densely populated Middle East have been owned by a small few and are thus the site of wars as well as ongoing religious and economic feuds. Questions of connection and connectivity translate into highly politicised cultural representations. Think of the dominant cultural representations of both Africa and the Arab world and how they come to be constructed by, and positioned as "outside" of seemingly important communal/global connections between their more "accessible" (and often politically aligned) counterparts.
<26> The issue of connection extends into a range of important political and theoretical domains. Not only do we focus on the changing nature of the human body with respect to its relationship to technology, we think about the implications connectivity across and between cultures. We start to think about the democratic nature of connections and we move into both the "productive" and less democratic aspects of the global. How does the capacity to connect reflect political and economic power and how does this power work within the context of less "connected" cultures? Can the very act of connection between certain cultures be viewed in terms of cultural imperialism and cultural erosion? Concomitantly can we also chart the ways in which cultural groups have used connection to re-establish themselves and to make connections with others across the globe? Here I'm not only referring to groups such as Arab women, or democratic and religious dissidents in China, but more localised groups too, from those who identify as queer to those who have been abused by family members — connection becomes about both changes to and the construction of specific communities as they articulate their own concerns.
<27> In charting the changes in the notion of community, we see the way connection changes our understandings of space and territory. So what we're talking about here is the "deterritorialzation" of spheres of communication in all their forms. Hepp (par 5) tells us that:
The first forms of establishing connectivity were highly based on "physical aspects" as, for example, a person's travels. By contrast, the forms of connectivity becoming important in the course of the past two centuries are forms with reduce "physical aspects". Of course internet connections still have a "physical basis" in electronic cable networks, but the forms of connectivity are more and more "de-linked" from this "base". It is important to emphasize this, because this is the reason why the process of communicative deterritorialization has its own speed, volatility and degree.
Hepp (par 6-8) sees this kind of connection as characterised by its speed (the flow of information is faster than goods or people), its volatility (its outcomes are less predictable than stronger foreign powers invading a space for instance) and the degree of its pervasiveness(in everyday life). He uses the term "translocality" to frame the way connections account for both the local and the global at the same time. This translocality means that "on the one hand, questions of all that is local still matter, and on the other hand today's locales are connected physically and communicatively to a very high degree."
<28> These observations still leave a space for us to view our technologically mediated connections in highly personal contexts. Cranny-Francis (forthcoming) makes the point that:
The immediacy of e-mail, chat-rooms, and of communicator programs such as Messenger (which allows dialogue on-line) makes possible this relationship between strangers, between those who are geographically separated, between those who are already in real time relationships, and so on. It enables virtual flirtations, seductions, affairs — without the responsibilities that attend their actual physical realisation.
So our connections change us on really intimate levels, making a range of personal connections possible which would otherwise be constrained by a series of geographical, material, contextual, and even moral constraints. Connection is therefore never far from our own particular subjectivities and our own sense of embodiment. Cranny-Francis continues:
In fact, it is the connectivity of the encounter — the fact that it is an interpersonal engagement — that identifies the user as a corporeal being. Which is to say that, in the act of engaging non-corporeally — via the internet — the user is reconstituted as a corporeal being because her/his responses and her/his predictions of the responses of co-respondents depend on their identification as corporeal (physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual) beings.
And this applies to the range of personal multimodal and multimedia connections we make, including blogging, Emails, SMS, instant messaging, chatrooms, Forums/Newsgroups and on-line gaming. Our own participation in these processes sees us re-imagine ourselves whilst constructing and imagining the other participants in these connections.
<29> So we can now go back to where we started and contextualise the initial comments we made about the nature of multimedia connection and its relationship to culture. The cultural implications of connection have been gauged through the specific characteristics of flow and networks in this paper. As such we can now draw the lines between texts, technology, environment, embodiment, and subjectivity by assessing both the cultural value and the threats of advances in connection:
New technologies may be employed by old cultures to affirm their cultural value and continuing role in contemporary society — as Australian Aboriginal cultures use television and the internet. What is at issue here is the appropriate response to these threats — rather than a Luddite dream of dismantling the technology. The technology itself is in a state of rapid change and development, with convergence of different systems a continuing source of interest. Mobile/cell phones are a major example of this — with their relatively recent incorporation of visual technologies and internet links. One constant feature of all this development is connection — that this technology is all about ways of people connecting to other people. (Cranny-Francis, forthcoming)
In this vein Ron Bennett (par 19) has argued convincingly that "connectivity is not just about connections but about reconceptualisation." It is about, in the words of Mitchell (in Casalegno par 24), what our human and technological connections "create":
Creating the possibility of making unexpected connections by allowing people to bump into each other, by allowing knowledge to be put together in different sorts of ways; this is important. Creating a cultural atmosphere that's not authoritarian but allows and values speculation. . . .
Likewise, in E-topia Mitchell (14) suggests that the global digital network will "reconstitute relationships of people and information" as "the enabler of new social constructions". So whilst relationships (between people, information and the social) are reconstituted and made "new", both the enactment and the embodiment of connection are ongoing. The shape of future connections may well be determined by technological change, but they will never exist independently of the social structures and cultural contexts shaping the bodies and worlds of developing individuals and communities.
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