Visual mobile communication, mediated presence and the politics of space MIKKO VILLI and MATTEO STOCCHETTIThis article is a study on the role of mobile phonesparticularly camera phones and photo messaging -in the management of social space, or what we like to call the 'politics of space'. Our notion of social space is a metaphoric representation of the nature and intensity of the involvement that inspires the uses of mobile communication technology for interpersonal communication. We discuss three themes: the motives for communicating with photo messages, the role of visuality in visual mobile communication and the role of visual mobile communication in the politics of space. In our study, we apply the proxemic theory developed by Edward T. Hall and the ritual view of communication as defined by James W. Carey. Our empirical engagement with photo messaging as a communicative practice suggests at least two insights. First, it has all the traits of ritual communication. Second, the distinctive value of visual communication in this type of telecommunicative practice seems to consist mostly of mediated presence and the synchronicity of the gaze. We conclude that the mobile phone is an ambivalent technology for ambivalent desires: a tool for maintaining a feeling of presence in the state of absence while preserving the possibility for absence.

Abstract:The idea that digitalization, in general, and digital visuality, in particular, can have, alone, subversive or otherwise, emancipative effects on politics is based on the belief that the ideological apparatus supporting hegemonic relations consists of false ideas that the "power of images" can effectively challenge once larger parts of society are given access to this "power". This idea misinterprets the role of digital visuality by misconstruing the role of ideology, and by positioning visual communication and associated technology in a sort of socio-political vacuum: beyond the reach of ideology and the relations of power supported by it. Based on the insights provided by the classical works of Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard on the visual construction of reality, I argue that an authoritative discussion of the cultural, social and political implications of digital visuality in Western societies invites the intellectual positioning of this process within the broader framework of hegemonic capitalism and the problems of control associated with it. My main point is that in Western societies, the actualization of the subversive potential of digital visuality, as well as that of other forms of communication, requires material conditions that depend on ideology rather than technology. These ideological conditions explain why, for example, digital visuality may be effective in the cultural and socio-political subversion of non-capitalist societies. In Western societies, however, despite the extensive subcultural uses of digital visuality, the subversive potential is fatally reduced (if not nullified) by mechanisms that can be subsumed in what Frederic Jameson called "the cultural logic of late capitalism". In support of my main argument, I offer some preliminary reflections on the media coverage of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the uses of organized violence in the "Arab Spring" of 2011.

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In the digital age, the practical possibility of engaging inequalities as political problems, that is, as problems related to the competition for the control over the distribution of values in society, is undermined by the digital invisibility of reality In the current state of affairs, the digitalization of society reflects the influence of capitalist interpellation and brings about the invisibility of the real. The invisibility of the real through capitalist digitalization, in turn, conflates digitization and digitalization subordinating the latter to the former. Construed as a process inspired by technological rationality, capitalist digitalization undermines the possibility of mobilizing knowledge and legitimizing practices in support of the interpretation of invisibilities in relation to inequalities and injustice. In line with the critical perspective of Andrew Feenberg and others, my approach is that the influence of capitalism in the digital age results from an epistemic appropriation of a technological development. This appropriation is the source of invisibilities that support inequalities and ultimately injustices that can and should be opposed. Leading on from this, my point is that opposition to this influence depends on the possibility of establishing alternative epistemic grounds and the formulation of alternative interpellations for the production of digital subjectivity. To foster the normative agenda of critical theory, I discuss this possibility in terms of the ‘dialectics of the real’, the re-politicization of the social construction of reality in the digital age and the role of critical media literacy.