Mobility, Immobility and Moorings

Mobility theory seems to be the new flavour of Sociological thinking as a way to (attempt to) explain the way the world operates.

What follows is my response to the opening article in what appears to be a Sociological journal.

Some of what I say may make little sense without the article that I am responding to, but I'm sure my Sociology colleagues will know what I'm getting at.... Whether they agree or not is a matter of (their) opinion, which I'd love to hear.

As there seems to be no on-line component to our course, and as I work in on-line education, I figured that maybe we could be subversive and start our own little community where we can discuss things and clarify any issues/problems we might be experiencing.

I think we can learn a great deal off each other - we just need to swallow our pride and put what we're thinking out there for others to bounce off. Fell free to post your thoughts and responses on this blog. Feel equally free to either post what you've submitted here, or to set up your own blog (its so easy - Blogger.com) and post them there.

I'm happy to co-ordinate the links so we can all get to each others site if necessary.

So I guess I'm first!

Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings

First thoughts first…

I was a little disappointed when I first realised what the term ‘Mobilities’ has come to represent - Sociology’s attempt to label (compartmentalise?) the paradimic changes that are occurring around our increasingly digitised world seemed a tad anti-climactic.

Having come from a past infatuation with Baudrillard and notions of ‘Hyper-reality’, I guess I was expecting something far more (melo)dramatic, a term that encompassed 21^st Century attempts to address the rapidly evolving social change that is spiralling us towards who knows where…. Post-hyper-super real-virtualised phenomenology or such….

But really a name is purely a symbol, (Barthes?) and as such in some ways (im)mobilities kind of suits.

Sociology’s analysis (visions) of a world that moves in the physical and linear, or at least in a comprehensible way, frantically getting faster and wider, seems to avoid issues of the hyper-super real and virtualised.

Is this where sociology is heading I wondered? Is it really stuck in an immobility of its own making?

As I read on I became a little more at ease, assuming that this piece was a simple overview, and that my decade long lack of engagement with sociological theory and my natural cynicism were taking my thoughts down a creepy path that I could not really follow. I am only too willing to admit to my lack of knowledge, and that I am currently uninformed and un(der)prepared to really make these assertions. For now these thoughts stay on the back burner.

Anyway…(briefly)

Until reading this article, I had never thought of what Urry et al term illicit mobilities. Well not the physical types at least. Being a digital worker, I am constantly aware of computer viruses and the like, but notions of diseases and terrorism, drugs and arms smuggling and human slavery as involving concepts of mobility, while completely obvious, had escaped my consideration. I guess that in some ways I’m climbing back over the digital fence and re-examining the analogue world with a new set of eyes (thanks I think!)

The concept of increased mobility being dependent on ever increasing levels of infrastructure is an interesting dialectic. More concrete forms of place to increase more elastic forms of space. The real to foster the hyper-real!

I really enjoyed how this applies to concepts of the nation state and the example used of the airport as a trial or experiment for technologies that may (will) be deployed into the 21^st Century social cosmos.

I was fascinated about discussion around 9-11. (Interesting for a start how 3 numbers have come to signify such a huge change in how the world does business.)

As well as the obvious(?) issues around ease of movement, security and terrorism that were raised, what I particularly enjoyed was the thinking that this article generated in me around the movement of physical place into the realms of hyper-reality. For 24 hours the networked world (read that as you will) became New York. While we all watched in (mediated) horror as the events unfolded from the comforts of our homes, it was as if every one of us lived there, in the midst of this tragedy, as if we could all look out the window and see the planes and smell the smoke and that it was our city, our reality. The hyper-real completely invaded our physical space!

Incidentally, the concept of time also evaporated into the ether.

There is also something about the role of memory and nostalgia involved too, I’m thinking, but quite how it all fits together I’m not too sure (yet).

The acknowledgement by the authors of the fluid nature of research around the notion of mobility, I find heartening, to say the least.

There really are a number of issues, particularly centred on the digital world, (teleconferencing, file sharing, facebook, second life to name but a few) that need to be addressed in more depth. (maybe they are?) The issue of virtual space and movement within it was barely touched on in the article apart from the moorings concept. I’m guessing that a lot more has been written around this issue, and it is an area that personally appeals to me.

I struggle to find relevance in the notion that disasters, both natural and man-made are catalysts to the evolution of mobility systems and found the piece on the hurricanes particularly challenging. To me the (scandalous) governmental response to this disaster reeked particularly badly of class and race issues rather than of issues around access to mobility and immobility (ice trucks driving around America like headless chickens – really?)

Also in the forefront of my attention were the hyper-real fictions (mediated stories?) of the murders, of the raped children in the toilets, of the dead and dying being left where they lay in the football stadium, which re-emphasised the preconceptions that have been generated about poor black humans (not just American, but throughout the entire world) and spun by a complicit media industry to their voracious consumers.

I feel to talk about mobility in this situation cheapens the whole argument and in some ways reinforces the constructed fiction.

However the effects of 9-11 on the field of surveillance, intelligence gathering other security issues is undisputed, and fully impacts on the mobility and its gatekeepers and as such in some ways makes a meal of my previous argument!

Anyway…

I have (re)caught the sociological bug.

The article was enjoyable and I’m pleased that I can see and start to understand the issues around this concept. As I said previously, I’m disappointed at the name choice, and am hopeful that issues around the cyber are being more fully investigated.

I find the notion of mobility interesting – so much of the world can be explained in part at least by the concept, but like all things post-modern, there are no meta-narratives, and most explanations as to how and why things are as they are, come in varying shades of grey.