Mobilities, Networks, Geographies

The last decade or so has seen striking increases in both long-distance travel and in communications through mobile phones, text messaging, emailing, videoconferencing and so on. Such developments in communication, along with a similar increase in physical travel and movement of goods around the globe, reconfigure social networks by disconnecting and reconnecting people in new ways. This book puts forward one of the first social science studies of the geographies of social networks and related mobilities of travel, communications and face-to-face meetings. The book examines five interdependent mobilities that form and reform these geographies of networks and travel in the contemporary world. These are: physical travel of people for work, leisure, pleasure, migration and escape; physical movement of objects delivered to producers, consumers and retailers; imaginative travel elsewhere through images and memories seen on texts, TV, computer screens and film; virtual travel on the internet; and communicative travel through letters, cards, telegrams, telephones, faxes, text messages and video conferences. In the book, the authors examine the interconnections between these different mobilities. They research how travel and social meetings require systems of coordination using virtual and communicative travel in-between physical travel and meetings. They argue that, while it might be imagined that there would be less need of physical meetings with improved ICTs, on the contrary, scheduled visits and meetings have become highly significant. The research shows that they are necessary to social life in the contemporary world, both within business and especially within families and friendships which are increasingly conducted at-a-distance.