absent presence

I'm not convinced by Kenneth Gergen's arguments in his article "The challenge of absent presence" in Katz and Aarhus (eds.): Perpetual Contact. Gergen claims that the general tendency of communication technologies have been to enable communication at a distance. Absent presence refers to situations where one is "physically present but (...) absorbed by a technologically mediated world of elsewhere." So far, so good (... so what?). But:

Gergen separates between monological technologies (mass media) and dialogic communication technologies. In the latter category he includes the telephone, video and computer games and the Internet. Dialogic communication technologies are, surprise, characterised as interactive. I don't think the Internet per se (or computer games) can be included in a category called dialogic. The Internet has several monological forms or genres or whatever.

More seriously though, I think Gergen underplays the significance of the local and the context for using any kind of media (of relevance: Anne's reference to David Morley on global/local). A sentence like "Friendship, intimacy, family and neighbors cease to be the primary sources of meaning, and become the objects of deliberation from yet another domain of reality" seems like a pessimistic claim proposed at least ten years ago. I raise my eye-brows again and again: "We move into a cultural condition in which our identities are increasingly situated, conditional and optional". It sounds very last millenium-like (I love being able to say that). He concludes with arguing how the cell phone is sort of different, because it is more typically used among intimate friends. But then, damn it, the cell phone is turning more and more into a small computer, again intensifying de-localizing tendencies.