Wirelessness as Experience of Transition

• Main Author: Adrian Mackenzie
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Humanities Press 2008-01-01
• Series: Fibreculture Journal
• Subjects: wireless networks; radical empiricism; William James
• Online Access: http://thirteen.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-085-wirelessness-as-experience-of-transition/

The paper analyses wireless networks in terms of a concept of experience drawn from the work of William James. James' account of experience focuses closely on the effects of ongoing change, and this is particularly useful in thinking about media change. The specific experience in question here is 'wirelessness,' an experience that envelops many media, infrastructures, practices, and processes today. The paper argues that a concept of wirelessness uniquely connects together a set of perceptions, representation, materials, problems and events associated with ongoing change in contemporary media and information cultures. In analysing wirelessness as form of experience, the article examines how those feelings of ongoing change shape and inform experiences of self, otherness, place and sociality in technological-informatic environments. In describing different infrastructural and commercial dimensions of wirelessness, it pays close attention to how ‘conjunctive relations’ (James’ term) such as ‘with’, ‘between’, ‘near’, and ‘inside’ arise in wireless networks, and how different kinds of intimacy and distance stem from conjunctive relations. The paper explores how wirelessness embodies and organises networked places. In this respect, the paper inverts conventional understandings of the network as ground or platform. It treats the under-represented yet highly significant embodied experiences of relations as generative of information infrastructures.