Conclusion: Mobilizing Medieval and Modern Identities

Summary

The twenty-first century is marked by hypermobility. A global economy, social networking, and the celebration of invention and innovation motivate us to move. Our technology reflects this propulsion: streaming television services give us as little as five seconds of credits before catapulting into the next episode, Instagram abbreviates posts longer than 125 characters to encourage scrolling, and video games implement carefully calculated reward schedules to keep players online. Rare is the moment when one sits quietly, content in a mind and body at rest.

The impulse is to attribute these movements to modernity. Lee Patterson writes,

philosophers since Hegel have asserted that the first step in moving from the closed immobility of traditionalism to the open dynamism of modernity is to endow the self with autonomous desire: the transformation of institutions requires and entails the transformation of individuals.

Here modernity is aligned with mobility, characterized as open, dynamic, and transformative. In this positive valuation, modern subjects climb corporate ladders and display pinned maps on their walls to broadcast their worldliness. But, as Patterson goes on to observe,

such transformations also entail an overwhelming sense of loss. …To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world––and at the same time, threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.

Indeed, studies show that technological interferences in the form of cell phones and email notifications encourage users to jump between multiple tasks rather than focusing on and accomplishing a single goal, subjecting our bodies and minds to a carousel of information as our attentions spin from one device to the next. We accomplish less because we are exposed to more. And social media has cultivated a new sort of curiositas that has modern subjects seeking to know whatever their friends and acquaintances are willing to share online. Like the concupiscentia oculorum condemned in Book 10 of Augustine's Confessions, these digital curiosities are eschewed by modern scholars who cite studies that link social media use to a rise in mood disorders among young adults. One is therefore left to wonder: is mobility indicative of dynamism and progress, or does it signify the deterioration of the unfragmented subject?