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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 December 2024
At a closer look, Mundania is constantly re-created. Order is, as we have seen, merely temporarily and situationally fixed. Mundania is like an image on a computer screen that seems to be static, but beneath and beyond the glass surface of the screen there is a constant flow of energy, processes and invisible work upholding what is experienced as a motionless image. Mundania keeps on emerging as people experience it.
What is experienced as ordinary and what is experienced as inertia or transformation is contextual. The different experiences of change, interferences and suspensions are furthermore unevenly distributed. There is variability and mutability in Mundania. Conditions might change and differ between time and context. Shifting tempi, temporalities and horizons of possibility for different people. This variability is related to social processes and stratifications and to the ways imaginaries unfold. What is possible, how does variability emerge and how is it maintained? The here and now of Mundania is influenced by projections into different times and possibilities, by expectations of what could come and what is remembered.
Elsewayness
How to capture the fleeting now, the emergent contemporary, and all the complex processes that continue, emerge and enmesh throughout time? How to capture all the varied rhythms and processes that uphold Mundania? How is the very local connected to distant places and to larger and stronger ongoing changes? Futures to pasts? All the incalculable potential entanglements. Uploading of files to a cloud service and climate change. Configuration of a webcam and the fluctuations of stock values of tech corporations on Nasdaq, the cosy hue from the light of a smart lamp and the death and suffering radiating from conflicts over rare earth metals? What is linked to what, and what is relevant to consider?
How the future of Mundania is manifested is not predetermined. It is important not to fall into the trap of technological determinism, to think that the specificities of the technologies that we are enmeshed with will inevitably steer us into one specific future (Rahm and Kaun 2022: 24). The future is inherently uncertain, unknowable and enigmatic, and attempts to steer or predict what will happen often fail. This is why it is relevant to think about futures in plural (Pink 2022: 14-15).
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