The circulation of abstract values through global interconnected networks sprawls on the back of the possibility of transporting information independently from its bodily carriers (Bauman, 1998: 14). It is, then, an apparent contradiction that the development in technologies of information and communication has so far contributed to bring people closer to each other. There have never been so many people living in so many and so dense cities as today. Inside most of those cities, financial districts develop and concentrate agents and functions of different markets. We tend to think that the functions of the new economy could be performed at distance. Even if those markets deal with abstract commodities, abstract risks, or serve abstract forms of capital, the actors and the networks through which they connect are real and material, and it takes time and energy to transport through space the people and materials with which they deal.
Moreover, the means of transporting people, objects, information and meaning are more than mere intermediaries. They may be mediators, as they operate tasks of translation, shifting the meaning of messages. They may also be central agents of transformation. With the development of technological artefacts and the growing complexity of the systems they form, we increasingly feel the need to understand how those media act and thus to turn them into objects of our questioning (Latour, 2005).
In the highly awarded 2004 film Estamira, the main character, an impressive woman who has lived a big part of her life in a dump in Rio de Janeiro, rants about the people responsible for the world’s problems and injustices. In her troubled but at times surprisingly lucid mind, the “hypocrite, liar, who throws the rock and hides the hand” is to blame, as we see tons of rubbish (including, amongst many other rotting things, dead human bodies!) being unloaded next to her makeshift house. But even if the human agents are understood as virtual, its effects are all too real and transported through material, if decomposing media. Likewise, the virtual nervous system of transmission of fear, built by the neo conservatives at the opening of the century in the US, used very real media: television. For Brian Massumi, it is exactly the material characteristics of the medium and their effective exploitation that makes the system work. We can add to this list Cetina’s description of the foreign currency market. Even if the flows are informational, the networks through which they travel are composed of material objects that shape and even constitute the market. The computer, Reuter’s informatics’ system, the desk, the trading room are all elements acting decisively over the course of events.
For the trader at the computer terminal as for the American citizen in front of the TV screen, the social reality is deep and liquid, impossible to understand from the partial evidences of an ever changing reality that are unloaded on their framed interface device.
Moreover, the means of transporting people, objects, information and meaning are more than mere intermediaries. They may be mediators, as they operate tasks of translation, shifting the meaning of messages. They may also be central agents of transformation. With the development of technological artefacts and the growing complexity of the systems they form, we increasingly feel the need to understand how those media act and thus to turn them into objects of our questioning (Latour, 2005).
In the highly awarded 2004 film Estamira, the main character, an impressive woman who has lived a big part of her life in a dump in Rio de Janeiro, rants about the people responsible for the world’s problems and injustices. In her troubled but at times surprisingly lucid mind, the “hypocrite, liar, who throws the rock and hides the hand” is to blame, as we see tons of rubbish (including, amongst many other rotting things, dead human bodies!) being unloaded next to her makeshift house. But even if the human agents are understood as virtual, its effects are all too real and transported through material, if decomposing media. Likewise, the virtual nervous system of transmission of fear, built by the neo conservatives at the opening of the century in the US, used very real media: television. For Brian Massumi, it is exactly the material characteristics of the medium and their effective exploitation that makes the system work. We can add to this list Cetina’s description of the foreign currency market. Even if the flows are informational, the networks through which they travel are composed of material objects that shape and even constitute the market. The computer, Reuter’s informatics’ system, the desk, the trading room are all elements acting decisively over the course of events.
For the trader at the computer terminal as for the American citizen in front of the TV screen, the social reality is deep and liquid, impossible to understand from the partial evidences of an ever changing reality that are unloaded on their framed interface device.