Sitting on the bus, commuting, I look around at my fellow travelers. Four out of the eleven of us have headphones on, plugged into some sort of personal electronic device that we carry on our persons. Three of the eleven are looking at their cellphones, or at some similar handheld device. Five of us are reading [either a book, a magazine or newspaper]. Where are these people? Can they really be said to be on the bus?
I know that their bodies are on the bus - I can see them - but does that define where someone is? We are more than just our bodies. While the body as such is indeed a thing amongst things, as Merleau-Ponty says, we “certainly do not exist in the way in which things exist.”[1] Our minds exist outside of objective time and space, as do our virtual selves and our virtual acts. A person writing a text message is able to make that message appear somewhere far away [it could be the other side of the city, or the country, or the world]. How can a human have such reach if what makes them ‘them’ is only confined to their physical location? A person checking the news on their Blackberry, or a person reading a newspaper is able to discover information about something which is happening or has happened a long distance away. If the person has a GPS device, they can observe their location from the perspective of a bird, a perspective very different from their natural one – a perspective of far greater range and scope. When a person listens to music on headphones, they are effectively blocking off one of their physical connections with the world in order to use it for something that they consider to be of higher priority - likewise with someone staring intently at their book. It seems that simultaneously as we expand ourselves outwards with regards to our ability to sense and to affect change, our ‘presence’ in the physical world around us shrinks.
Our perception of space and time, in which we are situated, are fundamentally altered by these phenomena. How will we learn to navigate these new parameters to our reality?
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