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The Laptop on the Beach.
Chris Chesher, School of Media and Communications, University of New South Wales
| [ Go to this paper in the timetable ] |
The businessman on a banana lounge, sipping a pina colada, and selling shares online on a laptop is typical of the utopian images put forward by techno-evangelists.
The pitch is irresistible: net surfers ride on the waves of information, located only by their position in the any-space-whatever of 64 bit Internet address space. The real life body could be anywhere. In the light of a potentially endlessly interchangeable physical location, a salesman will invariably conjure an image of something like a tropical paradise. His blurred vision of technically-mediated nirvana will blend the spaces of work and leisure, public and private, nature and hi-technology. Much of the attraction of ubiquitous computing is in how it allows an eternal deferral of final resting places. There is no place where the data exists. There is no software version that is ever complete. There is no material body that contains the data. Everything can be invoked to appear on demand, on the beach, or anywhere.
This paper extends my work on invocational media by exploring some of the tropes around beaches and high technology.
