Mobile Lives

203 Pages·2010·2.19 MB·English

by  Anthony Elliott, John Urry

Mobile Lives
How should we understand the personal and social impacts of complex
mobility systems? What are the costs of mobile lives? Can lifestyles
based around intensive travel, transport and tourism be maintained in the
twenty-first century? What are the possibilities of developing 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,
ordin ary lives. The authors develop their arguments through an analysis of
various sectors of mobile lives: networks, new digital tech nologies,
consumer ism, the lifestyles of ‘globals’ and intimate relation ships at-a-
distance. Elliott and Urry introduce a range of new concepts – miniaturized
mobilities, affect storage, network capital, meetingness, neighbourhood
lives, portable personh ood, 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, post -
graduates and teachers in sociology, social theory, politics, geography,
international relations, cultural studies, economics and business studies.
Anthony Elliottis Chair of Sociology at Flinders University, Australia, and
Visiting Research Professor at the Open University, UK. His recent books
include Contemporary Social Theory: An Introduction (2009), The New
Indi vidualism 2nd Edition (with Charles Lemert, 2009), The Routledge
Companion to Social Theory (editor, 2010) and Globalization: A Reader
(co-editor, 2010) – all published by Routledge.
John Urryis Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University,
UK, where he is Director of the Centre for Mobilities Research. His recent
books include Mobile Technologies of the City (co-editor, Routledge,
2006), Mobilities(Polity, 2007), Aeromobilities(co-editor, 2009), After the
Car (co-author, Polity, 2009) and Mobile Methods(co-editor, 2010).
International Library of Sociology
Founded by Karl Mannheim
Editor: John Urry, Lancaster University
Recent publications in this series After Method
include: Mess in social science research
John Law
Risk and Technological Culture
Towards a sociology of virulence Brands
Joost Van Loon Logos of the global economy
Celia Lury
Reconnecting Culture, Technology
and Nature The Culture of Exception
Mike Michael Sociology facing the camp
Bülent Diken and Carsten Bagge
Advertising Myths Laustsen
The strange half lives of images and
commodities Visual Worlds
Anne M. Cronin John Hall, Blake Stimson and Lisa
Tamiris Becker
Adorno on Popular Culture
Robert R. Witkin Time, Innovation and Mobilities
Travel in technological cultures
Consuming the Caribbean Peter Frank Peters
From arkwarks to zombies
Mimi Sheller Complexity and Social Movements
Multitudes acting at the edge of
Between Sex and Power chaos
Family in the world, 1900–2000 Ian Welsh and Graeme Chesters
Goran Therborn
Qualitative Complexity
States of Knowledge Ecology, cognitive processes and
The co-production of social science the re-emergence of structures in
and social order post-humanist social theory
Sheila Jasanoff Chris Jenks and John Smith
Theories of the Information Society Sound Moves
3rd Edition IPod culture and urban experience
Frank Webster Michael Bull
Crime and Punishment in Jean Baudrillard
Contemporary Culture Fatal theories
Claire Grant David B. Clarke, Marcus A. Doel,
William Merrin and Richard G.
Mediating Nature Smith
Nils Lindahl Elliot
Aeromobilities
Haunting the Knowledge Economy Theory and method
Jane Kenway, Elizabeth Bullen, Saulo Cwerner, Sven Kesselring and
Johannah Fahey and Simon Robb John Urry
Global Nomads Social Transationalism
Techno and new age as transnational Steffen Mau
countercultures in Ibiza and Goa
Anthony D’Andrea Towards Relational Sociology
Nick Crossley
The Cinematic Tourist
Explorations in globalization, culture Unintended Outcomes of Social
and resistance Movements
Rodanthi Tzanelli The 1989 Chinese Student
Movement
Non-Representational Theory Fang Deng
Space, politics, affect
Nigel Thrift Mobile Lives
Anthony Elliott and John Urry
Urban Fears and Global Terrors
Citizenship, multicultures and Forthcoming in the series:
belongings after 7/7
Victor J. Seidler Global China
Lash Scott, Keith Michael,
Sociology through the Projector Arnoldi Jakob, and Rooker Tyler
Bülent Diken and Carsten Bagge
Laustsen Stillness in a Mobile World
David Bissell and Gillian Fuller
Multicultural Horizons
Diversity and the limits of the civil Revolt, Revolution, Critique
nation The paradox of society
Anne-Marie Fortier Bulent Diken

Mobile Lives
Anthony Elliott and John Urry
First published 2010
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.
© 2010 Anthony Elliott and John Urry
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Elliott, Anthony.
Mobile lives: self, excess and nature/by Anthony Elliott and
John Urry.
p. cm.
1. Transportation – Social aspects. 2. Civilization, Modern.
3. Information technology – Social aspects. 4. Sociology –
Philosophy. 5. Social sciences – Philosophy. I. Urry, John.
II. Title.
HE147.5.E45 2010
303.48’32 –dc22 2009050207
ISBN 0-203-88704-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0–415–48020–5 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–415–48022–1 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–88704–2 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–48020–8 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–48022–2 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–88704–2 (ebk)
Contents
List of figures viii
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xiii
1 Mobile lives: a step too far? 1
2 New technologies, new mobilities 25
3 Networks and inequalities 45
4 The globals and their mobilities 65
5 Mobile relationships: intimacy at-a-distance 85
6 Consuming to excess 113
7 Contested futures 131
Afterword 155
References and notes 161
Index 183
Figures
All images © Ross Harley, reproduced with permission
1.1 Baggage collection, Xian Xianyang International Airport,
2007 xiv
1.2 Announcement board, Prague International Airport, 2007 12
2.1 Online services, Kuala Lumpur International Airport, 2007 24
2.2 Departure hall, Seoul Incheon International Airport, 2007 35
3.1 Internet lounge, Seoul Incheon International Airport, 2007 44
3.2 Connect Zone, Seoul Incheon International Airport, 2007 55
4.1 Global time display, Kuala Lumpur International Airport,
2007 66
4.2 Departure hall, Seoul Incheon International Airport, 2007 75
5.1 Travelator, Dubai International Airport, 2007 84
5.2 Sleep Inn, George Bush Intercontinental Airport Houston,
2007 99
6.1 Holland Casino, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, 2007 112
6.2 Travelex queue, Prague International Airport, 2007 122
Preface
Consider the following irony. People today are ‘on the move’, and arguably
as never before. Massive social changes – globalization, mobile techn ol-
ogies, intensive consumerism and climate change – are implicated in the
ever-increasing movement of people, things, capital, information and ideas
around the globe. It is estimated that people today travel 23 billion
kilometres each year. By 2050 it is predicted that, if resource constraints
do not intervene, this will increase fourfold to 106 billion kilometres each
year.1Travel and tourism make up the largest industry in the world, worth
in excess of $7 trillion annually. The number of international flight arrivals
nears one billion. People today are travelling further, faster and (for some
at least) more frequently. While many choose to travel, others are forced
to be ‘on the move’. Asylum seekers, refugees and forced migration also
proliferate. Add to this a rapid explosion in communicative and virtual
mobilities, with more mobile phones than landline phones and over one
billion internet users, and it is clear that a golden age of mobility has truly
arrived – bringing with it dizzying possi bilities and terrifying risks. Mean -
while, some social scientists warn of the dangers of declaring that there
really is any ‘epochal social change’ taking place here; there is business as
usual.
How might we account for such denial? Why is it that, in a globalizing
world based on accelerating mobilities, issues concerning transformations
of movement are mostly neglected by mainstream social science? This and
other difficult questions surrounding issues of movement are asked and
answered in the ‘mobilities paradigm’ – which is a systematic sociology of
mobility transformations, as detailed in John Urry’s Mobilities.
Mobile Livesraises many newquestions about the intersections of insti -
tut ional mobility systems and transformed, everyday, ordinary lives. The
argu ment of the book is that changes in how people live their lives today
are both affected by and reflect the broader changes of global mobility