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September 26, 2005
Terminal Rhetoric: Memories of the Future
Note: if you haven't picked up a copy of Mark Dery's article yet, you can find one in the black, hanging files outside my office door (OM 115A).
Dery's article presents a sardonic reflection on air travel. At its heart, he writes about the disappearance of the "futuristic" world promised by TWA and international air travel in the 1960s. In its place, we have air travel as something more like travelling by bus than on a cruise ship. With two more airlines (Delta and NorthWest) headed for bankruptcy this month, the future of the industry is uncertain (though obviously we rely upon air travel, so it isn't going anywhere anytime soon).
There are two particular elements I wanted to comment on (perhaps you will as well).
1. Dery's discussion of the class warfare represented in the division between First Class and Coach. I'm guessing you've all flown at one time or another. What's your take on this? Do agree with Dery's assessment that the airlines maintain this division more to hold onto their notion of what airline travel should be than for reasons of profitibility?
2. The increasing role technology plays in regulating our lives (e.g. the computerization of piloting aircraft). Obviously in many respects this regulation is convenient and comforting, and yet I'm sure many of us reject the techno-patriarchy of a kind of robot/daddy knows best. As Dery writes, "we're being asked, more and more, to trust in technologies whose speed and complexity are leaving humans in the dust, even as that trust is eroded by firsthand acquaintance with the fickle, glitchy, virus-infected reality of computers" (301). Imagine this: you're boarding a plane and you see the pilots booting up the onboard computer. Suddenly you hear the telltale tones of the Windows OS starting up...wouldn't you turn around and get right off the plane? I don't think I'd want to take a ride on MS Plane, would you?
The point here for us in reading this is to think about information technologies in the context of flight technologies. Clearly there is the issue of hype, and in a way we've already been through the hype with the dot.com bubble in the late nineties. But there's always more hype, right?
However, I've got a broader philosophical issue to address. This idea that technology of some kind is going to save us OR damn us... It relies on the principle that technology is outside of "us." Only by being separate from us can technology come along and threaten our "interiority" (who we believe we are on the inside). I don't buy that. That doesn't mean that technologies can't be helpful or harmful or both simultaneously. Instead, it means that we need to see ourselves imbricated with our technology. There is no "inside" versus "outside." In a way, Dery demonstrates this in showing how our technology unfolds with our class prejudices and our fears already built-in.
Posted by Alex Reid at September 26, 2005 12:17 PM
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