Passé Media: Communication and Transportation on Commuter and Computer Buses

Abstract

This essay proposes the concept of "passé media" as a contribution to scholarship that combines communication and geography, as well as to work that foregrounds background processes of networked, digitized social production. Passé media, communication and transportation technologies that both connect endpoints and are acclaimed only until the next technology arrives, reveal at least three attributes: (1) a novel way to conceptualize mobility, (2) the transformation of use-value to exchange-value, and (3) the continued ecological imprints of digital technologies. To illustrate, we turn to the bus, deployed both for transportation (commuter buses) and communication (computer buses). We argue that the moment of the bus highlights the ways in which spaces of connection are simultaneously privileged and ignored, highlighted and effaced. It's a bus-age wonder, Magic Bus-Pete TownsendWaiting for a bus is a quotidian experience in two senses. First, the wait for a commuter bus: standing on a curb near a sign, watching the time, listening for familiar sounds of the rumble of diesel and the relief of the air compressor to lower the bus on its suspension. This is waiting for transportation. Second, the wait for the computer bus, the internal pathway in all computers where data are passed back and forth between the processor and memory. This wait involves watching graphical interfaces that display percentages processed or loading bars. This is waiting for communication.Often, these two activities occur simultaneously; commuters play with their smartphones while waiting for the bus to arrive, and they wait for the app to load.