Phase Media by James Ash

Author:James Ash
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Endo and exo politics

In a basic sense endo and exo mean either inside or outside, respectively. Biologists, for example, discuss different types of living beings as having either endo or exo skeletons. Most mammals, including humans have endoskeletons internal to the body, which work to support the muscles and internal organs. Crustaceans and arachnids, such as lobsters and spiders, have exoskeletons composed of chitin, with internal musculature attached to the exoskeleton by ingrowths called apodemes. Applying this notion of endo and exo to smart objects, by endo politics I mean politics that refer to how objects perturb one another to shape the production of a phase. By exo politics I mean how a phase modulates spatio-temporal intelligibility and shapes the references that humans use to make sense of their environment. A distinction between endo and exo modes of politics is important in order to analyse exactly how particular smart objects contribute to particular phases and in turn how these phases guide or shape the appearance of a political issue for a public. To make sense of the endo and exo politics of smart objects, let’s turn to a specific example of cell phone towers in the village of Wishaw in the UK. Through an examination of these cell towers we can understand how smart objects, and the systems that enable these objects to generate phases, become political.

a) Endo politics

Think of the fears and concerns that have arisen around the use of smart objects such as smartphones in relation to human health. There are many recorded cases of people believing that they are negatively affected by radio waves and signals transmitted by smartphones and wireless devices, such as tablets and laptops (Wood 2006). These negative affects include conditions such as fatigue, depression and electromagnetic hypersensitivity. Electromagnetic hypersensitivity is a term used to describe a range of symptoms such as headaches and tiredness that people who are exposed to electromagnetic radiation are said to experience (Rubin et al. 2005). Electromagnetic hypersensitivity is a contentious condition because the majority of medical research on the topic argues that the radio waves generated by smartphones and the cell towers and Wi-Fi routers that smartphones use to connect to data services are not powerful enough to cause harm to humans (Drake 2006, 2010). As such, many medical professionals believe electromagnetic hypersensitivity to be a psychological ailment, rather than a physiological response caused by exposure to electromagnetic radiation (Rubin et al. 2008; Johansson et al. 2010).

Within the political compass of left and right and up and down, we might argue that the political issue of electromagnetic radiation in relation to human health is a matter of figuring out whether such hypersensitivities are real or not (truth politics), or in the case of cell phone towers specifically, a matter of fighting the corporations who place these towers in the environment (power politics). In turn this kind of politics could also be inflected with left and right tendencies. On the one hand, electromagnetic radiation could be understood as a public

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