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| A SHORT HISTORY OF THE CELL |
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| by Peter Halley |
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I love my cell phone. I have two of them on different networks for the times when one or the other won’t pick up a signal. In fact, I’ve had a cell phone for ten years. The first phones were only for cars, since the electronics and battery weren’t small or light enough to be really portable. I didn’twant to keep mine permanently installed in my car, so I managed to find a device the size of a small briefcase that I carried around with me. I’m glad they’re called “cell phones” or “cells” instead of “mobile phones” because it was the “cell” that I posited in the early 80’s as the general metaphor for the kind of space that we inhabit.
I’ve never been able to figure out why cell phones in other countries work so much better indoors than ours do. I remember when, after the end of the USSR, business people in Russia had to have cell phones because the existing phone system was so inadequate. It seemed that the old world of linear wires would soon be a thing of the past. Today, when I travel overseas, I always rent a cell phone. Of course, I have my bankcard too. Next I want a handheld GPS to find my way around. It’s strange to be triangulated by so many satellites. But I never feel alone anymore.
In the ‘70’s, artists and social critics began to become interested in the concept of nomadism: the post-industrial individual becoming a modern nomad moving through the world without any real home, cut loose from identification with any city or nation. Today, when so many of us doubt the existence of a cultural vanguard, it is significant to note how many recent vanguard ideas have in fact anticipated present developments. The nomad of Archigram or Germano Celant has become the present-day road warrior, equipped with cell phone, laptop, palm pilot and e-mail address. Today, our place of residence, the place where we can be reached, has become our bodies themselves, and not the static houses or cities where we mundanely reside. Listening to the radio in the morning I always notice how N.P.R. commentators are routinely identified as “based in Los Angeles” or “based in Boston.” Personally, I still “live in” New York. I still believe in the viability of a city-culture.
A few months ago, the old version of the future went down in flames: the Concorde crashed. Twenty years ago, only a French guy named Virilio and the strategic planners in the U.S. military understood that in the future it would be speed of communication and not speed of physical movement that would count. Power becomes instantaneous communication over long distances.
The key to the whole system is of course never mentioned— the fleets of orbiting communications satellites that encircle the world. I used to wonder how I could get cash from a bank machine in Italy or Japan, or use my credit card to pay for gas in Los Angeles. Why would these companies instantly approve my credit? The answer is constant instantaneous radiowave communication between the satellites and their computers everywhere on the globe. A call from a cell phone goes to a local antenna. From there it is transmitted to a satellite system that beams it back to the appropriate local cell system, and then to all the cell phones at use in that particular system. Then the phones’ computers sort the myriad transmissions until one of them recognizes its own code.
Deleuze described a social space that was becoming defined by flows and folds. But we also live in a physical space permeated by countless co-existing electromagnetic waves. Rigid logic becomes flow, and webs of lines are replaced by oceans of waves. Communication becomes a seductive electromagnetic ocean through which we swim. And, as we know, seduction is the most effective form of social control.
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