The Compelling Tangle of Modernity and Technology (original) (raw)

2002, Modernity and Technology

I'm checking in, heading home, answering questions. "Please step this way, I have a few things to ask you.. .. Did you pack your own bags this morning? Has a stranger given you anything to carry? Where were you staying in the Netherlands? I do need to see your passport." I decide to give straight answers, even if the smiling young womanofficially, I suppose, with the full power of the Dutch nation-state behind hersoon enough goes way beyond the script of ensuring safe travel. "How many days did you stay? What were you doing here?" Stay calm, I think. This is no concrete-and-barbed-wire interrogation, even if she still has my passport. I'm on friendly and familiar terrain. Schiphol is an unmistakably human-made space, beautiful in its way. Bright painted steel-framed ceilings high overhead, a wall of windows spotless as only the Dutch can make them, the quiet hum of air conditioning, the periodic clunk of baggage conveyors, the pleasant babble of a thousand people on their journeys. Five minutes ago I arrived on a sleek electric train, whose bulb-nosed profile still calls to mind the classic shape of a Boeing 747. So Claire's next question-I've sneaked a peak at her name tag-takes me off-guard. "This workshop you were at, I don't understand, what exactly do you mean by 'modern' and 'technology'?" Well, I say, look around you. Is there anything more assertively modern and more thoroughly technological than an airport? Airports-we might equally think of harbors, subways, skyscrapers, automobiles, telephones, or the Internet-are deeply implicated in the social and cultural formations deemed "modern" by the founding fathers of social theory. Can you imagine an anthropologist of any "traditional" society doing his or her fieldwork on some exotic ritual in which 300 strangers willingly line up to be crowded into a narrow cylinder-shaped space, placed in seats so close their shoulders touch, and strapped down for hours on end? And they pay for this privilege! Yet the airport ritual is a common experience of contemporary life, and more to the point, it embodies and enacts certain key features of