Portability
Globalization is often portrayed as hyper-mobility across spaces of heterogeneity. In this imaginary landscape, unfettered movement, seamless translation and complete reciprocity reign. Such a utopia requires impossibly totalizing and instantaneous objects, things like universal translators and total-information computers. But whether unleashed in reality or in science fiction, mobile objects quickly become encumbered by quotidian problems: enabled with our mobile phones, we obsess about how we might carry them, where we can use them, and why not. "Roaming" frustrates.
issue of Thresholds, 34, 2007
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