Overview

An account of the sensations associated with being entangled with wireless technologies that draws on the philosophical techniques of William James's radical empiricism. How has wirelessness—being connected to objects and infrastructures without knowing exactly how or where—become a key form of contemporary experience? Stretching across routers, smart phones, netbooks, cities, towers, Guangzhou workshops, service agreements, toys, and states, wireless technologies have brought with them sensations of change, proximity, movement, and divergence. In Wirelessness, Adrian Mackenzie draws on philosophical techniques from a century ago to make sense of this most contemporary postnetwork condition. The radical empiricism associated with the pragmatist philosopher William James, Mackenzie argues, offers fresh ways for matching the disordered flow of wireless networks, meshes, patches, and connections with felt sensations. For Mackenzie, entanglements with things, gadgets, infrastructures, and services—tendencies, fleeting nuances, and peripheral shades of often barely registered feeling that cannot be easily codified, symbolized, or quantified—mark the experience of wirelessness, and this links directly to James's expanded conception of experience. “Wirelessness” designates a tendency to make network connections in different times and places using these devices and services. Equally, it embodies a sensibility attuned to the proliferation of devices and services that carry information through radio signals. Above all, it means heightened awareness of ongoing change and movement associated with networks, infrastructures, location, and information. The experience of wirelessness spans several strands of media-technological change, and Mackenzie moves from wireless cities through signals, devices, networks, maps, and products, to the global belief in the expansion of wireless worlds.

Full Product Details

9780262014649

Table of Contents

Reviews

Wirelessness remains a work in progress, a mutable technology still mutating. Mackenzie is the best guide we have to its intricacies and effects. Adopting a radical empiricist approach, he shows the way in which wirelessness not only configures but experiences the world differently by concentrating on a range of cases, each of which provides its own particular means of enlightenment. A book that asks different questions and provides different answers from the gloop of network-speak that sometimes threatens to engulf us. Terrific.

Author Information

Adrian Mackenzie is Professor of Technological Cultures in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University and the author of Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures (MIT Press).

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available