Tantalisingly Close: An Archaeology of Communication Desires in Discourses of Mobile Wireless Media

Abstract

While many studies on mobile wireless communication devices predominantly take a micro-scale approach and concentrate their often ethnographically informed focus on use values, social implications, conversation strategies, changing norms and ethics, culture-dependent domestication, and so forth, with this Ph.D. dissertation I propose to venture into a more historical and comparative direction, mainly in order to shed light on and engage the question of why we invest so much of ourselves in mobile wireless communication devices in the first place. I aim to extend the existing body of research on mobile communication to include a more expanded view of the development, marketing, and reception of mobile communication technologies, and to provide a more comprehensive account of how mobile communication technologies have come to occupy such a prominent position in our media landscape. Starting with an analysis of how human affects like hope and desire stand at the base of necessary fictions, of myths that tell us that a better tomorrow is near if only we improve, I determine in what ways and to what purpose such hopeful and luring myths come to be expressed in the ideals of communication that are presupposed in various communication models. I show that these ideals, despite the fact that in their radical conclusions they end up being experienced as dystopian scenarios, are powerful strategic elements in portraying communication as something that can can be improved. I then argue that recurrent myths of improved communication inform and constitute the 'good tricks' of media evolution: they supply the discursive tropes of what ideal communication could be, and how it should be reached. Hence, in the development of communication technology we find stories that tell us, over and over again, that better communication is at hand, if only the technology is perfected and people learn how to use it effectively. To analyse the function of idealised ideas of communication in media development, I take on a multi-sided perspective that adheres to the guidelines of what is called a 'media archaeological approach', which deals with studying cyclically recurring discursive elements in the historical contexts of media machines. With this approach I proceed to uncover the regulative function of utopian communication claims in order to study how throughout time they have known various manifestations, and to what extent they play a role in co-constructing discourses of mobile wireless communication devices. This dissertation concludes with the notion that so far all media have tried to reach ideals of communication by improving on themselves, but have failed. Mobile wireless communication devices, as the most recent addition to our media spectrum, may seem to achieve communication utopia, but our experience and expectations of these media are surprisingly similar to those of older media; they reconfirm and reinforce the idea that actually reaching an all-encompassing 'anyone, anything, anytime, anywhere' experience can be both a blessing and a curse, that the desire for ideal communication is a tragic and paradoxical yet highly powerful regulative principle in our media evolution.