Mobile Lives

Anthony Elliott, John Urry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781134019212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios internacionales

How should we understand the personal and social impacts of complex mobility systems? Can lifestyles based around intensive travel, transport and tourism be maintained in the 21st century? What possibility post-carbon lifestyles?

In this provocative study of "life on the move", Anthony Elliott and John Urry explore how complex mobility systems are transforming everyday, ordinary lives. The authors develop their arguments through an analysis of various sectors of mobile lives: networks, new digital technologies, consumerism, the lifestyles of 'globals', and intimate relationships at-a-distance. Elliott and Urry introduce a range of new concepts – miniaturized mobilities, affect storage, network capital, meetingness, neighbourhood lives, portable personhood, ambient place, globals – to capture the specific ways in which mobility systems intersect with mobile lives.

This book represents a novel approach in "post-carbon" social theory. It will be essential reading for advanced undergraduate students, postgraduates and teachers in sociology, social theory, politics, geography, international relations, cultural studies, and economics and business studies.

Figure 1.1 Baggage collection, Xian Xianyang International Airport, 2007

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Mobile lives

A step too far?

Yet other contrivances might be invented for transporting people from one place to another, submarine, subterranean, aerial and spatial, as well as new methods of disseminating speech and thought; but, since the people travelling from one place to another are neither willing nor able to commit anything but evil, the thoughts and words being spread will incite men to nothing but evil.

Leo Tolstoy¹

A mobile life

Simone is a British-based academic, originally from Brazil, who travels a great deal for her work.² Like many academics living in expensive cities of the West, her job involves her in continuous renegotiation of her professional and personal commitments, and perhaps nowhere more so than when it comes to travelling. Consider one of her recent trips to the US, where she attended a conference. Flying into JFK airport, Simone went through a drill she had undertaken many times since major changes to airport security following the New York terror bombings of September 11: biometric ID, fingerprinting, passport check and close scrutiny of her reasons for travelling to Manhattan, especially given her ambiguous racial characteristics and her husband’s Iranian background. Clearing customs, Simone reached for her BlackBerry to check incoming emails, and afterwards phoned a friend who had already arrived in New York earlier that day. An academic of international renown, Simone travelled to New York, not only to deliver a keynote address to an academic conference, but also to act as a consultant for a private recruitment company operating throughout the Middle East. After her journey to Manhattan by taxi, Simone checked into a hotel she had booked the previous week from Berlin (while attending another conference) and flicked on the Chinese-made TV in her room, seeking updates on the increasingly turbulent international weather. As it happens, she has a string of other professional commitments in the coming weeks, which will involve further travel and probable delays.

Travel is itself an ambivalent category in Simone’s life. On the one hand, she finds travel exhilarating, liberating and the source of new opportunities both for networking and for indulging herself in places of excess, especially being able to shop without limit. On the other hand, her regular international travel seems to bring new burdens. She is concerned about the amount of time she is spending away from both her husband and six-year-old daughter. Sitting down to coffee and launching her Apple laptop, she scans through the academic paper she will read tomorrow at the conference. Unable to concentrate, she picks up the phone and dials London, hoping to reach her husband and above all to talk with her daughter before she goes to bed. But she has not brought the correct adapter to recharge the battery of her mobile. Frustrated, Simone is able to activate iTunes on her laptop and selects a song that vividly evokes emotions she feels for her family. As she listens to the music, and now in a calmer state of mind, she returns to thinking about her conference presentation. All of this has taken a couple of hours to unfold since clearing customs and the suspicious security guards at JFK. The city is New York, but it could as easily be Dublin, Durban or Dubai. Indeed, Simone has travelled to all of these in the last couple of years, as her hurried (and harried) professional life transports her through various major cities of the planet, networking and shopping as she goes.

What does Simone’s fast-paced, consuming life tell us about the changing social world in the first decade of the twenty-first century? Partly it shows the importance of the fast modes of movement that have developed in recent times, often at the expense of slow modes such as walking and cycling. While in 1800 people in the US travelled fifty metres a day, principally by foot, horse and carriage, they now travel fifty kilometres a day, principally by car and air.³

This growth in fast travel stems from various interdependent processes: the growth of automobility throughout the world, with over 650 million cars roaming the world’s highways, increasingly in the world’s two most populous societies of China and India; the rapid growth of cheap air travel based on new budget business models; the resurgence of rail transport, especially through high-speed trains across Europe and Japan; the development of new kinds of globally significant themed leisure environment that have to be visited from afar; the increased ‘miles’, both flown and travelled, by manufactured goods, components and foodstuffs on the world’s 90,000 ships; and the greater distances travelled by work colleagues, members of leisure organizations, families and friends in order to sustain ‘distanciated’ patterns of everyday life.⁴ Carbon use within transport accounts for fourteen per cent of total greenhouse emissions, is the second fastest growing source of such emissions, and is expected to double by 2050.⁵ It is not so much money that makes the world go round but cheap plentiful oil and its resulting carbon emissions.

Forms of life in the ‘rich north’ (such as Simone’s) have thus been ‘mobilized’. Social practices have developed and become ‘necessary’, presupposing large increases in the speed of travel (by humans) and in the distances covered (by both goods and humans). Simone’s professional work reflects how it has become almost impossible to undertake the routine ‘practices’ of business and professional life without regular train journeys, flights, taxi rides, tourist buses, email, text, phoning, skyping and so on. The practices are mobilized.

Moreover this hurried, and what Linder termed ‘harried’, life criss-crossing the globe presses in deeply upon the self, on its everyday routines, scripts of selfhood and textures of emotion.⁶ This explosion of fast mobilities is fundamentally significant to the transformed nature of occupations, personal identity and life-strategies. There are various transformations involved here that we now elaborate.

First, an individual’s engagement with this expanding mobile world is not simply about the ‘use’ of particular forms of movement. Rather, the rise of an intensively mobile society reshapes the self – its everyday activities, interpersonal relations with others, as well as connections with the wider world. In this age of advanced globalization, we witness portable personhood. Identity becomes not merely ‘bent’ towards novel forms of transportation and travel but fundamentally recast in terms of capacities for movement. Put another way, the globalization of mobility extends into the core of the self. Mobility – especially the demands that issues of movement place upon people – has been a feature of most societies. One can note preindustrial mobility systems of horse riding, coach travel, shipping and especially walking. In conditions of advanced globalization, by contrast, software-driven, digitized systems of mobility – from air traffic control systems to mobile telephony – exert new demands upon the self and its capacities for psychic reorganization. This is clear, not only from the dynamism of Simone’s incessant travel, but also from her traversing new communicational and virtual mobility systems. One central consequence of this is that identity in the ‘rich north’ of the world is significantly constituted as, and inscribed in the scripts of, a mobile life. And this is true, not only of those actually doing the travelling, but also those who are receiving visitors, being ‘hosts’, paid or unpaid, to those who are incoming from near and especially those travelling in from afar.⁷

Second, Simone’s schedule of international travel indicates that the trend towards individualized mobility routinely implicates personal life in a complex web of social, cultural and economic networks that can span the globe, or at least certain nodes across parts of the globe. This engenders what has been described as the ‘small-world’ experience. Those meeting in distant places can discover that they are in fact connected through a relatively short set of intermediaries. As many people predictably state: ‘It’s a small world, isn’t it?’ This notion is sometimes couched in terms of ‘six degrees of separation’ between any two people on the planet, with much lower degrees of separation between those who are closely networked, as with Simone.⁸

Third, owing to the transnational spread of various fast ‘mobility systems’ (from the car system to air travel, from networked computers to mobile phones), people seem to define aspects of their self-identity, as well as schedules of self- and life-strategies, through reference to de-synchronized, post-traditional or ‘detraditionalized’ social settings, where such schedules are rarely shared.⁹ Life ‘on the move’ is the kind of life in which the capacity to be ‘elsewhere’ at a different time from others is central. Email, SMS texting, MP3 audio, personal DVD recorders, internet telephonic services and so on enable people to seek escape from the constraints of pre-existing traditions or traditional forms of cultural life, under more fluid patterns and practices. Such mobile lives demand flexibility, adaptability, reflexivity – to be ready for the unexpected, to embrace novelty, as even one’s significant others are doing different things and at different times. People’s experiences are de-synchronized from each other, so that systems and people have to be available ‘just-in-time’.¹⁰

Fourth, this means that peoples’ lives involve enticing possibilities – something Simone grasps well as she moves up her profession, although she believes she has already met a glass ceiling as she is not quite in the ‘right’ male (mobile) networks for global advancement. But it is also a world of new threats. A life ‘on the move’ is one with unwanted sexual advances, the uncertainties of delayed and unpredictable journeys, and regular separation from family and neighbours. There are, of course, various virtual mobilities (mobile telephony, email and so on) to repair the journeys or to keep in touch; but these are only so good as long as they work, which they quite often do not.

Fifth, Simone’s mobilities presuppose many other people whose lives can be relatively immobilized. These include check-in clerks, hotel room and aircraft cleaners, the repairers of mobile phone masts, those making her fashionable clothes in South East Asian sweatshops, baggage handlers, her daughter, security guards on Iraqi pipelines and the conference organization teams, who are all on hand around the world in order to make Simone’s mobile, ‘just-in-time’ life on the move just about feasible. They are, in a way, ‘immobilized’ by the movement of others (some of the dark aspects of ‘immobilization’ are analysed in Chapter 5).

Sixth, the reshaping of the self through engagement with increasingly complex, computerized systems turns life towards the short-term, the episodic, bits of scattered information, slices of sociality. Life ‘on the move’ appears to unfold faster and faster in the early days of the twenty-first century, as people become more reliant upon interdependent, digitized systems. Through the use of what we term miniaturized mobilities (mobiles, laptops, iPods), people track the twists and turns of social life inherited and co-created with others. Through ‘do-it-yourself’ scheduling and rescheduling, people are forced to plan courses of action and forge plans with others that comprise complex interplays of connection and disconnection.¹¹ In realizing such DIY lifestyles, today’s digitized systems of mobility open the self to new forms of ‘openness’ and self-disclosure – reconstituting Being, as Heidegger says. If Dasein or Being is ‘referentially dependent’ on the social things around it (as Heidegger argued), then a world of accelerated mobilities cannot leave the self fundamentally unchanged. On the contrary, we should see that the emergence of complex, global mobility systems involves the creation of new forms of mobile life, new kinds of daily experience and new forms of social interaction. People of course carry on doing many of the things that they have always done. But the rise of mobile worlds also spawns radical experiments in mobile life. Life ‘on the move’ is one in which ‘networking’ and the ‘networked’ self-undertake routine, repetitive operations of connecting and disconnecting, logging on and off. With this in mind, we can reinterpret Heidegger’s description of Being-in-the-world in terms of getting ‘wrapped up’ within mobile systems.¹² In a mobile society, our ways of Being-in-the-world tend towards the individualized, privatized collecting of experiences, places, events, trips, acquaintances, data and files. As a general phenomenon, the social things in which people become ‘wrapped up’ centre more and more upon what elsewhere we refer to as ‘instantaneous time’, or what Rosa and Scheuerman term ‘acceleration’.¹³ Thus, the task of holding self and one’s social network together is increasingly reconstituted around instantaneous computer clicks of ‘search’, ‘erase’, ‘delete’, ‘cut-and-paste’ and ‘cancel’.

This theme goes to the core of Mobile Lives. Our argument is that ‘disorganized capitalism’ in the rich north of the world, with its dominance of finance, outsourcing, short-term contracts and just-in-time deliveries, has parallel consequences for personal and social lives. This is even registered in the dominance of short-term thinking or the emotional weight of multitasking and multiple careers.¹⁴ Just as financial flows facilitate the virtually instantaneous transfer of capital around the globe, as well as the buying, selling and accumulation of mobile resources across the territorial boundaries of nation states, so too globalism ushers in an individualized order of flexible, liquid and increasingly mobile and uncertain lives, at least for some citizens in some parts of the contemporary world.

Others, of course, have mobility thrust upon them, as the number of refugees, asylum seekers and slaves also hit record levels in the early twenty-first century. Such migrants will experience many short-term, semi-legal employments, relationships and uncertainties as they dangerously travel across borders, in containers and backs of lorries, always on the lookout for state and private security. And much of the time, refugees are immobilized within refugee camps located outside cities. As Homi Bhabha argues: ‘for the displaced or the dispossessed, the migrant or the refugee, no distance is more awesome than the few feet across borders.’¹⁵

Seventh, the increasing reliance on miniaturized mobilities serves to facilitate the development of what we call affect storage and retrieval. Consider, again, Simone’s inability to reach her family on the phone. How did she respond to this? She called up iTunes on her laptop, and selected a Brazilian song that evoked strong memories of home and family in London. People have, of course, ‘used’ music to evoke memory in many different social settings and historical contexts. The arrival of miniaturized mobilities, such as MP3 players, iPods and mobile phone audio, alters the social contexts in which people can access music, photos, videos and text. A central argument here is that the social impact of mobile lives can be grasped only if we dispense with the received wisdom that people mainly use new information technologies to transmit information from sender to receiver, the communications model of ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’. Our argument is that the use of various miniaturized mobilities involves transformations in self-experience through the storage and subsequent retrieval of affects and emotions in the object world of generalized media communications. Drawing from the psychoanalytic research, we explore in Chapter 2 how miniaturized mobilities enable people to deposit affect...

Table of contents

• International Library of Sociology
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Mobile lives
• 2 New technologies, new mobilities
• 3 Networks and inequalities
• 4 The globals and their mobilities
• 5 Mobile relationships
• 6 Consuming to excess
• 7 Contested futures
• Afterword
• References and notes
• Index