One message flashes on the screen in hot pursuit of another. Your fingers are always busy: you squeeze the keys, calling new numbers to answer the calls or composing messages of your own. You stay connected – even though you are constantly on the move, and though the invisible senders and recipients of calls and messages move as well, all following their own trajectories. Mobiles are for people on the move.
You never leave your mobile out of sight. Your jogging gear has a special pocket for your mobile, and you would not go out with that pocket empty just as you would not go running without your training shoes. As a matter of fact, you would go nowhere without your mobile (’nowhere’ is, indeed, the space without a mobile, with a mobile out of range, or a mobile with a flat battery). And once with your mobile, you are never out or away. You are always in – but never locked up in one place. Cocooned in a web of calls and messages, you are invulnerable. Those around you cannot blackball you, and if they try, nothing that truly matters would change.
It is unimportant which place you are in, who the people are around you and what you are doing in that place filled with those people. The difference between one place and another, one set of people within your sight and corporeal reach and another, has been cancelled and made null and void. You are the sole stable point in the universe of moving objects – and so are (thanks to you, thanks to you!) your extensions: your connections. Connections will stay unscathed despite the fact that those connected by the connections move. Connections are rocks among the quicksands. On them you can count – and since you trust their solidity, you can stop worrying about how muddy and treacherously slushy the ground under your feet is at a time when a call or a message is sent or received.
A call has not been answered? A message has not been returned? No reason to worry either. There are so many other telephone numbers on the list, and seemingly no limit to the number of messages you may, with the help of a few tiny keys, knead into that little thing that fits so neatly into your hand. Come to think of it (were there time left to think, that is), it is utterly unlikely that you’d ever reach the end of your portable directory or type all the messages that could be typed. There are always more connections to be used – and so it does not terribly matter how many of them might have proved frail and breakable. The rate and pace of wear and tear does not matter either. Each connection may be short-lived, but their excess is indestructible. Amidst the eternity of the imperishable network, you can feel unthreat-ened by the irreparable fragility of each single, transient connection.
Into that network you can always run for shelter when the crowd that surrounds you becomes too madding for your taste. Thanks to what is made possible as long as your mobile is securely ensconced in your pocket, you stand out of the crowd – and standing out is the membership application, the term of admission to that crowd.
A crowd of stand-outs: a swarm, to be more precise. An aggregate of self-propelled individuals who need no commanding officer, figurehead, haranguer, agent-provocateur or stool-pigeon to keep it together. A mobile aggregate in which each mobile unit does the same, but nothing is done jointly. Units march in step without falling in line. The true-to-form crowd expels the units that stand out, or tramples over them – but it is only such units that the swarm tolerates.
Mobile telephones did not create the swarm, though they no doubt help to keep it as it is – as a swarm. The swarm was waiting for the Nokias and the Ericssons and the Motorolas eager to serve it. Were there no swarm, of what use would the mobiles be?
Zygmunt Bauman
1925 - 2017