On turning our technological lives back into freedom

Professor McPherson notes that "emergent modes of experience are neither innocent nor neutral" (207). This reminded me of the promises held by so many technological advances and that inevitably have been absorbed into human-consumer lifestyles and turned into constraints and subjugation. The freedom of having a car turned into people having to commute for hours everyday to make it to their jobs. The internet allowing one to be connected at all times blurred the lines between work and leisure time, entrusting workers to be prompt and effective around the clock. Amanda Lots writes about the evolution of TV and its paraphernalia: "convenience, mobility, and theatricality redefined the medium" (50). As "Viewers gained greater control over their entertainment experience" they also become "attached to an increasing range of devices that demanded their attention and financial support" (51). Emergent modes of experience, Prof McPherson says, "model particular modes of subjectivity which can work all too neatly in the service of the shifting patterns of global capitalism" (207). Bottom line, "We might see out web-enhanced experiences of volitional mobility, scan-and-search, and transformation as training us for a new neo-Fordist existence" (McPherson 207). At the end of the day, the new devices and experiences that shape our lives are embedded in our capitalist economic model. Behind the convenience and ideals that may motivate us to create and adopt them lurk the new lifestyles that they shape for us, for good and bad, and always for capital's efficacious outcomes. There are empowering aspects to these changes, and our challenge is to not lose sight of them: as the freedom ideation of innovation becomes disorted by capital, we must remember the core ideal and not lose track of the freedom/empowerment at its root. Or as Professor McPherson writes, in conclusion of her analysis of the web's volition offerings, "While the 'click and buy' logic of DEN certainly overrides the ontology of volition mobility with an illusory ideology of volition, that these modalities are also part of the forms of the Web suggests a redemptive possibility, if only in the ways they activate our very desire for movement and change, a desire that might be mobilized elsewhere" (207).