As Angela Guimaraes Pereira has argued in her Soapbox post, this could be a great case study of a
moment of interruption, cessation, that suddenly makes us notice technology.
I want, however, to
reflect on two rather different points. Over the past week I have been
surprised not just by the spectacle of disaster we have seen in the news but by
the robustness of technological
systems, in the sense of networks of actors and technologies and objects. So:
all transatlantic flight and most European routes have been cut off, in the
biggest shutdown since 9/11 and the longest since goodness knows when, in an
age when our lives are routinely spread across continents. But there was no
rioting at airports. There are no food shortages. No-one has been drowned
desperately trying to cross the channel or the Atlantic, and, though people are
left adrift all over the world, there are systems for caring for these people.
Consulates have swung
into action and there are systems for releasing and gathering news: I knew very
quickly that the NATS site – temporarily redesigned to cope with
heavy use – was the best way of getting up to date information. There are
procedures and protocols. Countries liaise and scientific data is fed into the
mix to produce what seems, at this distance, a smooth and controlled chaos
(rather than the smelly, bodily, exhausted chaos that travelers sleeping in
airports must be facing). Even airlines are efficient in this: we ring, join queues,
have tickets re-assigned. There are systems, and those systems have (more or
less) remained intact.
We have not been living
in a disaster movie, in other words. And it seems somewhat surprising to me
that one of the key technological systems of our age can catastrophically let
us down and utter chaos – fighting, scratching, black-marketeering chaos – not ensue. The systems that remain
intact are informational ones. They tell us what to do and, crucially, what is
happening. Imagine if this had happened fifty, hundred, two hundred years ago,
but with the level of passenger numbers we have today. How would anyone know
what to do?
But this moment is also
fascinating because air travel remains so highly used precisely because
technology is not enough. In an age of Skype, of video conferencing, of cheap
long distance phone calls, we are reliant on flying because we yearn for human
contact: for touch, smell, face to face speech. Technologies of flight make us
more human, not less. They are bound up in affect: excitement, feeling
effective, homesickness, the sense of adventure and exploration, love,
intimacy. While I am loath to quote Love, Actually and its ridiculous affirmation of LHR as the home of life-affirming
affection (most experience the airport as a sort of vortex of misery, from
noise pollution to traffic jams to immigration officials), it does make the
point that people travel because they love each other. Or – we might add – because
they want to see the world, and experience the enchantment of the new. Or
because they can be more efficient, more productive, better business people face to face. And therefore the disruption
of our travel is also emotional: we lose something of ourselves, become less
than what we hoped to be. We lose particular identities and are trapped in
others that have been forced on us. A distant manager rather than a hands on
one. A colleague rather than a friend. A traveler rather than coming home.
Of course, whether we
have the right to these transformations is another question. But they are with
us all the same, and we cannot consider our technological systems – however
damaging, however stressful, however untimely – in isolation from them.
