Learning ubiquity

Over the course of this paper, I have found that when faced with arguments such as Heidegger's notion of readiness-to-hand (98) and its implications for the ways we (don't) think about the technology we live with, and perhaps especially Luhman's posthuman insistence that society is no longer a "human" one (5), I find it the most natural thing in the world to struggle with these concepts for a few hours, maybe a couple of days, and then at the end of it suddenly retcon my own knowledge from a snide "what is this heresy?" to an equally superior "well obviously".

Growing up between the '90s and early 2000s, I was involved in the social revolutions of email, instant messaging programs, social network websites and downloadable music and movies. I have lived through one of the largest cultural paradigm-changes in history, have been on both sides of what we now know as the digital divide, and as ubiquity continues to colonise and settle in all regions of our cultural database, I have to wonder if my attitude is simply a coping mechanism, the result of some overlooked repository of internalised technophobia breaking the surface of my unconscious, goaded out by data that threatens to rewrite my cognitive map.

Have I learnt effectively? And am I the only one whose values are pre-ubiquity in a post-ubiquity world? The warnings of police to online daters following a woman's gang-rape after agreeing to meet somebody she met on Tinder directly regurgitate rape culture's victim-blaming rhetoric, which far precedes the concept of ubiquitous media. Is media too ready-to-hand (Heidegger, 98) for us to responsibly use without juggling a job and dense philosophical study, even if "we" are the police, the government - the people who design this media?

Who is learning, and learning what?

Bottles and bus stops

09/11/2014, 2:50pm. Bus stop. Sun-induced heat. Bus is due but has not arrived. Lack of water bottle.

 

Tension builds.

09/11/2014, 3:05 pm. Bus arrives - on the other side of the road, completing its route from the city. I suppose this means it will soon come around again to this stop and finally "arrive".

Really wishing I'd brought my water bottle.

09/11/2014, 3:15 pm. Bus still has yet to "arrive", despite the fact that I saw it across the road ten minutes ago, and it only comes once an hour, said hour supposedly beginning and ending every ten minutes to the hour. Why is it late? Did I miss an automated text? I do not possess this information. 

The information that I do possess is that this bus should have arrived at 2:50pm, as it clearly states on the timetable. We don't even have a digital timetable here; we only have one of the plastic ones skewered on a pole. That is also information I have ready-to-hand. 

I have decided that, at this point, the next bus is due in half an hour anyway ("due"), so I may as well risk going back to the house and getting my water bottle.

09/11/2014, 3:22 pm. It has been four minutes since I returned with my water bottle, and the bus has now finally arrived, after standing for half an hour in anticipation of said arrival. 

As I board, I wonder if this crisis might have been averted if my facebook profile was public rather than private, if I allowed Google to track my location, if I had made myself more accessible, allowed myself to be fully encapsulated by the various arcane algorithms and unexplained profit margins that enclose my position within the traffic of the social network. If only I had embraced ubiquity more fully.

Wherever ubiquity is, it's not on my bus route.