Technologies in general are not new to society. They are as old as our civilizations and social and cultural institutions. However, the forms and manifestations of technologies that we witness today are definitely newer compared to what they used to be a generation back. Smartphones, tablets, iPods, smart TVs, smartwatch, Internet, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are only a short list of recent technological innovations.For better or worse, they have brought about unprecedented transformations in the ways we think, act, interact, and live our lives. The rapidly changing technologies are also changing what French anthropologist Marcel Mauss many decades ago would call "techniques of the body"—particular ways of engaging the body, i.e. walking, dancing, running, swimming, fighting in the war, etc.
Social efficacy
Neither technologies—material infrastructures more generally—nor our everyday encounters and experiences of them are fixed. As much as our future aspirations and imaginations have shaped the existence of technologies and their multiple manifestations, our lived experiences and their coming about are continually shaped and reshaped by the very beings of technologies as well. My parents and grandparents would walk for two days for a return trip to get a basket-full of salt until three decades ago while in a village in Pyuthan district, which was yet not connected through motor roads. While growing up, I had seen my mother spending as many as four hours to fetch a vessel-full of water in the absence of a water tap in the village. One would have to walk about half a kilometer to get to the nearby bush or forest to defecate as there were no toilets or latrines in the entire village with 14 households.
While I was a high schooler in the late 90s and my father was working in a remote mountain district in Far West Nepal, my mother would spend several hours just to be able to call him from a local public call center (known better by an acronym PCO) in Kohalpur of Banke district. Now examples like these may sound archaic for many cosmopolitan Nepalis for that the country has been widely connected through roads, telecommunications, and different media forms regardless of their uneven distribution across regions and social groups. Nepali society, economy and polity have changed a lot in the past couple decades alone.
Though the above examples are only a trajectory of my life history, I do however believe that they somehow resemble other people's experiences as well. The building of roads, telecommunication, and other material infrastructures has changed the way we relate to spaces and the meanings we assign them. For example, these modern infrastructures have dramatically altered the notions of what is 'remote' and what is not.
Similarly, they have changed our experience of time as well. These days we can travel a distance of several thousand miles in less than a day. Scholars argue how globalization and cosmopolitanism depends on the experience of 'immediacy' and makes us believe that speed is synonymous to development and progress.
Neoliberal time
The division of time into second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year and decade is one example of how we have appropriated it based on capitalist and neoliberal conceptions of social and economic life. The ideas of 'office hours' , 'school days' 'work days', 'deadline', 'planning', to name a few, are further evidences of how we have constructed and internalized the new ways of living through times that are very much dictated by 'immediacy' as an ideal of progress and change. Anybody who remains outside of these time regimes is treated as 'matter out of place' and may also be deemed incapable, unsuccessful, unproductive and regressive.
A football coach, who fails to produce positive results immediately, can be fired within months of the contract signing. The sackings of Jose Mourinho by English football club Chelsea and Rafa Benitez by Spanish football club Real Madrid are its recent examples. A CEO of a bank has to meet the yearly goals of profit. Otherwise, their position may be questioned. A student has to finish their degrees within definite years. Otherwise, they are disqualified. A non-governmental organization has to prove that it is meeting its 'targets' during its program period. Otherwise, its funding partner ceases its financial support.
Changing experiences
Equally important is the role of technology and infrastructure in transforming our sensory experiences of touch, smell, sound, vision, and taste. As a village kid I was fascinated by the sight of a motor on the road (mostly it used to be tractors, but sometimes buses and trucks, too) in a nearby town. As some of my contemporary friends share, they would find the smell of the diesel appealing during their childhood, but they feel otherwise these days. For the residents of a village in Pyuthan district, the sight and sound (honking included) of a passenger bus would emanate a positive feeling of witnessing the artifact of bikas.
The modern beast—that was a motor vehicle—was people's longing and desired imagination. Sharing a story of a bus ride would become a matter of pride for the teller and a sweet imagined world to be explored for the listeners. These modern infrastructures have transformed not only our imaginations, but also our habitus—particular ways of being and doing—and corporeal existence.
As argued by some scholars, the sound of industrial machines represented people's modern imagination in the earlier phase of capitalist development. What we now call noise pollution was really a fascinating sonic experience then. Unlike its negative connotation at present times, the industrial and urban 'noise' as we call it today was at that time a sign of progress, future promise, and economic advancement.
According to anthropologist David Howes, not only are senses socially and historically constructed, but also 'sensory experience may be structured and invested with meaning in many different ways across cultures. The industrial and automobile sound taken as an amazing sonic experience in the early stage of capitalist development or in one location, and as noise pollution in the post-industrial and consumerist era or in another location refers to the historical and social construction of the senses. The modernist architecture and urban planning that once symbolized the pinnacle of Western civilization and became an embodiment of luxury, pleasure, and aesthetic beauty are now being questioned under ecological, environmental, and social grounds.
With new technologies at hand, coupled with new imaginations, our tastes for almost everything—including travels and tours, business, education, eating, dating, love and sex—are rapidly changing. It's certain that more new technologies are on their way and so are our new habits, embodiments, and mannerisms.
The author is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, Canada
br.kavyi@gmail.com
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