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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 December 2024
What if everyday life was approached as a life in Mundania? A realm where more and more complex and incomprehensible technologies become part of the atmosphere. Layer after layer of these technologies is added. This realm shifts shape depending on context and the variabilities of everyday lives. Mundania emerges through the adoption of and adaptation to technologies that are gradually experienced as ordinary. It emerges through seductive offers and deals, built on the operations of a number of influential businesses. Mundania is then strengthened through recurring practices, rituals and routines through which technologies become intimately integrated in life. These circumstances make Mundania simultaneously banal and uncanny. Mundane and weird. At hand and ungraspable.
This book is a suggestion to imagine differently about so-called emerging technologies, about everyday life with foremost digitally engendered processes of computation bound together by vast technological and organizational networks and systems. It is also about continuously questioning what is experienced as and considered to be ordinary. What, when and for whom?
The book is based on a method I call ‘probing’. It is part research, part artistic practice and a way to serendipitously move between and remix different cultural analytic concepts and perspectives (Willim 2017b; 2023). In this, I will juxtapose and mix thoughts about the most miniscule and overlooked phenomena with discussions on broader issues. I will weave these together with theoretical arguments and elaborations.
I will concentrate foremost on how technologies, in the form of concrete material and corporate operations and often clandestine arrangements, can come together in everyday life, among those using, or rather living through, the technologies. I suggest that the realm of Mundania is based on a process called ‘mundanization’. I also suggest that Mundania is variable due to time, place and social circumstances. I will propose some variations of this realm and show how Mundania is based on processes of mundanization, and less so on domestication.
When technologies are introduced in Mundania, it is not about something wild becoming tamed and domesticated or converted step by step into controlled parts of everyday life.
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