Mobilities, Networks, Geographies

Jonas Larsen, John Urry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754648826
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317095163
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

There have been striking increases in both long-distance travel and in communications through mobile phones, text messaging, emailing and videoconferencing. 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 original 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 videoconferences. 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 technology, 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.

Chapter 1
Researching Networks and Travel: An Introduction

Introduction: Mobile Societies

‘Time–space compression’ is said to characterize modern societies (Harvey 1989). And yet there appear to be significant further changes taking place as to how social life is distributed over time, over space and over people’s life-course. ‘Time–space compression’ also seems to involve time–space distanciation, that is the geographical spreading of people’s social networks. The last decade or two has seen striking increases in travel and in longer-distance communications through mobile phone calls, text messaging and email. ‘Ordinary’ people in prosperous societies are increasingly on the move and communicating more to connect with absent others. There seems to be a shift from ‘little boxes’ of spatially dense and socially overlapping networks to networks where connections are spatially dispersed and membership of one network does not necessarily overlap with that of others (Castells 1996, 2000; Wellman 2002; Urry 2003; Axhausen 2005a, 2005b). Thus as the easy availability of cars, trains, planes and communication technologies seem to spread social networks beyond cities, regions and nations, so they reconnect people by helping to afford intermittent visits, meetings and frequent communication at-a-distance. People can travel, relocate and migrate and yet still be connected with friends and family members ‘back home’ and elsewhere. So, increasingly, people who are near ‘emotionally’ may be ‘geographically’ far apart; yet they are only a journey, email or a phone call away. Thus developments in transport and communication technologies not merely service or connect people but appear to reconfigure social networks by both disconnecting and reconnecting them in complex ways.

This book will show how contemporary technologies and practices of transport and communication are reconfiguring how people connect with places and each other, how they socialize with and relate to friends, workmates and family members, and how they make new contacts often at a distance. We will consider just why people travel when social networks are more mobile and dispersed. Given the significance of much more extensive communication within contemporary societies, why are there still increasing amounts of physical travel? Why bother with the risks, uncertainties and frustrations of movement? What is it about face-to-face meetings that people spend considerable money and time on the road and in the air to be physically present with other people? We consider how people stay connected when physically separated and on the move. Is networked social life at-a-distance going to be more important in the future? If so, what are the implications for travel and transport?

Social Science Approaches

It is difficult to find satisfactory answers to such questions either within social science or transport research. Much social science research ignores the movement of people for work, friendship and family, leisure and pleasure. Despite the fact that: ‘natives, people confined to and by the places to which they belong, unsullied by contact with a larger world, have probably never existed’ (Appadurai 1988, 39), the social sciences mostly fail to examine how social life presupposes both the actual and the imagined movement of people from place to place, person to person, event to event. And yet migration, pilgrimages, war, trade, expeditions and colonization have linked most countries in complex travel connections. From early times servants, settlers, missionaries, soldiers, sailors, traders, scientists and many others travelled and formed extensive links across the world (Weber 1976; Bartlett 1993; Clifford 1997; Fennell 1997; de Vries and van der Woude 1997; Urry 2000).

Some social scientists regard mobility as producing a lack of connections, commitment, trust and emotional nearness (Albrow 1997; Cresswell 2002). Mobility undermines communities and ‘social capital’, as recently argued by Putnam (2000). Human geographers have argued that mobility destroys authentic senses of place by turning them into ‘placeless’ sites of speed and superficial consumption. As Tuan says: ‘modern man might be so mobile that he can never establish roots and his experience of place may be all too superficial’ (1977, 183). Relph argues in a similar fashion that:

Roads, railways, airports, cutting across or imposed on the landscape rather than developing with it, are not only features of placelessness in their own right, but, by making the possible the mass movement of people with all their fashions and habits, have encouraged the spread of placelessness well beyond their immediate impacts. (cited in Cresswell 2002, 34)

George Simmel argued that people in the modern metropolis increasingly found themselves amongst strangers and they therefore had to learn the social skill of distancing themselves from the mobile crowd. Simmel adopted the figure of the stranger to illustrate the modern metropolis’s unique geographies of proximity and distance: here people are close in a spatial sense, yet remote in a social sense. Simmel thus suggests that strangers are nearby while ‘close ones’ are likely to be distant (see discussion in Allen 2000, 57).

Overall the methods of the social sciences tend to emphasize everyday face-to-face proximities and interactions. For example, Sheldon’s classic 1948 study of elderly people in Wolverhampton: ‘defined a close relative as someone who lived within five minutes walking distance, being a measure of the distance a hot meal could be carried from one dwelling to another without reheating’ (cited in Fennell 1997, 90). Successive studies of families, communities and social capital ‘have followed this steer in taking close to mean near or interacting frequently face-to-face; and, by extension, significant, important, meaningful’ (Fennell 1997, 90). Social science thus tends to focus upon ongoing and direct social interactions between peoples and social groups that constitute a proximate social structure. Travel is mostly seen as a neutral set of technologies and processes predominantly permitting forms of economic, social and political life explicable in terms of other, more causally powerful processes. Indeed, as we will see, research on social networks normally fails to analyse travel at all. Moreover, social science portrays communication as sequences of face-to-face-encounters in specific fixed physical spaces. We can say that social science in its analyses of communities, places and social life prefers to study roots rather than routes (Clifford 1997).

Transport Approaches

By contrast, transport planning and modelling mostly ignore the social dimensions of travel and the broader issues of how travel and transport help to produce modern societies. Transport researchers take the demand for transport as largely given, as a black box not needing much further investigation, or as derived from the level of a society’s income. Also, transport researchers tend to examine simple categories of travel, such as commuting, leisure, or business, and presume that journeys have one purpose. Moreover, most transport research and modelling sees travel as individually shaped and chosen (through individual utility maximization), and they therefore have little understanding of how travel patterns are socially embedded and depend upon complex networks of family life, work and friendship.

Most travel-demand forecasts and the resulting transport strategies are based on the assumption that travellers demonstrate highly routine and predictable travel behaviour. Transport researchers tend to focus upon everyday commuting and peak hour traffic, partly because this causes most problems for transport system managers. They concentrate upon the representative day with its representative rush hour. This overlooks the high level of day-to-day variability in travel patterns (Schlich et al 2004), especially because leisure travel is at the individual level less consistent over time compared with commuting. Leisure travel is an important component of this intrapersonal variability and indeed more generally of changing travel patterns. Transport research does not adequately explain why so-called leisure travel is fundamental to many forms of social life.

Research Objectives

This book seeks to remedy social science and transport planning approaches through developing, along with other contributions, a social science of travel as it tries to insert analyses of the social within transport research and of travel within the social sciences. We explore changes in travel and communication through examining the changing patterns of people’s social networks. We develop one of the first social science analyses of social networks, travel, communication and meetings.

While it seems that distances between members of networks have increased in the latter part of the twentieth century, not much transport research or social science research has systematically mapped such social networks and the associated networking practices. Partly inspired by Castells’s focus upon financial and informational networks (1996), much network and mobility research has focused upon mobile professionals with many weak ties but apparently few strong ones (Ó Riain 2000; Wittel 2001; Kennedy 2004, 2005; Beaverstock 2005; Kesselring 2006; Lassen 2006). Simonsen argues: ‘So issues of intersubjectivity, care and social connections – elements of everyday family lives – are conspicuous by their absence in such representations’ (2003, 30). By contrast, this book explores, to use Conradson and Latham’s term, ‘middling’ forms of mobile life (2005b, 229) and those strong ties to friends and family members. We examine to what degree dispersed ties and emotionally important networking at-a-distance are characteristic of many people other than the transnational elites and underprivileged migrants.

This book shows how there are five interdependent mobilities that form geographies of networks and mobilities in the contemporary world. These are:

• Physical travel of people for work, leisure, family life, 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;

• Communicative travel through person-to-person messages via letters, postcards, birthday and Christmas cards, telegrams, telephones, faxes, emails, instant messages, videoconferences and ‘skyping’.

We deploy the concept of network capital, of cars, motorcycles, season tickets, phones, mobile phones, internet access points, and so on, showing how such capital is necessary for organizing and orchestrating networks especially of those ties that live beyond the reach of daily or weekly face-to-face relations. This form of capital makes the world spatially and temporally smaller by affording long bridges and fast connections between geographically dispersed people, partly because imaginative, virtual and communicative travel allows people to be in a sense in two or more places at once. Most social research focuses upon one of these separate mobilities, such as passenger transport or mobile telephony or the internet, and generalizes from that. This book, by contrast, examines the interconnections between these different mobilities central to the making and maintaining of near and of faraway network ties.1

We examine how social networks are spatially distributed and how they are produced through networking practices of travel, communications and meetings in apparently mobile societies. Social networks involve technologies and work, there is networking through travel, communication and meetings. We will examine how, and where, they do network and make networks come to life through emailing friends and email lists, text messaging friends about parties, gossiping on the phone, cruising at receptions, chatting over a coffee, going for a drink and spending hours on the road and/or in the air between recurrent meetings (see also Conradson and Latham 2005b). And we explore the geographies of these networking technologies and practices: how much physical, virtual or imaginative travel do they entail, and over how long a distance?

We look at how networks have to meet up intermittently in order to cement their connections, to enjoy each other’s company and to carry out certain obligations. We hypothesize that in more-distributed societies with connections at-a-distance and people being less likely to bump into their contacts, scheduled visits and meetings are highly significant (Axhausen 2005b). Transport and meetings at-a-distance seem increasingly necessary and obligatory to social life, not only as commuting to work, but as leisure activities or through attendance at birthdays, weddings, funerals, or visits to friends and family members. Much travel demand seems to stem from a powerful ‘compulsion to proximity’, to feel the need to be physically co-present and to fulfil social and cultural obligations with significant others (sometimes against one’s will: Boden and Molotch 1994; Urry 2003). So this book explores the social obligations that result in various kinds of demand for physical travel.

This book pays much attention to what extent communications are enhancing and/or substituting for physical travel. We explore how travel and meetings are spatially and temporally coordinated, how people use websites, emails, text messages, mobile calls to synchronize complex preferences, diaries, travel routes and time schedules before and during meetings. Travel and meetings require systems of coordination and mobile communication technologies that enable dispersed network members to coordinate co-presence in-between meetings. Further, we consider how communication technologies may on occasions substitute for physical face-to-face meetings and hence travel. We briefly explore the significance of new and future ways of meeting up that do not involve physical travel and co-presence but rather virtual co-presence and communicative travel.

In particular we examine to what extent a small but carefully chosen sample of youngish people in the North-West of England have dispersed network geographies. Are their links predominately nearby or faraway? How far do they live from the people that are important to them? How often do they meet, talk over long distances and communicate with their strong ties and to what degree does distance determine regularity? So when we speak of geographies of social networks we explore how people have moved about over time and how they network spatially (close by, faraway, staying put, on the move, on the phone or the internet, etc.) and temporally (everyday, weekly, at weekends or holidays, etc.) with specific ties.

Mobile methods

This research project employs and develops mobile methods, by contrast with the methods of social science that are normally a-mobile2 as they emphasize everyday face-to-face interactions and short-distance mobility (Larsen, Axhausen and Urry 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006). So, until recently there has been a neglect of longdistance travel, occasional sociality and mediated communication. However, if friends and family members no longer live near each other, the regular ‘dropping-in’ type of visits becomes difficult. And when friends and family members do meet up each visit is likely to last longer (and involve staying over). We hypothesize that ceteris paribus the greater the distance between people who meet up, the longer the time that meetings will last. People may thus compensate for the intermittent nature and generalized transport cost of visits (time, money and weariness) by spending a whole day or weekend or week(s) together in each other’s company, often staying in each other’s homes (this may have implications for household and furniture size and design). While McGlone, Park and Roberts (1999, 146) document that friends and families socialize less often at each other’s houses, this is not the same as a general fall in friendship and family visits.

We noted that transport studies with their conventional one-day travel data privilege repetitive everyday mobility and by implication relative short-distance travel. If we only observe everyday mobility (within a short period of time) we will conclude that most people live relative localised lives. Thus a recent study concludes that Swedish families live localized lives because their everyday transport patterns are local and revolve around private homes (Ellegård and Wilhelmson 2004). Yet if the researchers had also had examined occasional long-distance travel and weekend touring, to visit friends or family members or tourist sites, their conclusions may not have been the same. Indeed, three transport studies have used six-week travel diaries to show that travel practices of households incorporate not only routines but also ‘detours’ and new destinations, especially over the weekend (if these studies had taken place over the summer holiday months, the significance of variety-seeking and long-distance journeys would have been even more marked) (Schlich et al 2004; Schönfelder and Axhausen 2004). The social life of most people during the week is bound up with a specific locality and short trips while many embark on longer journeys such as leisure activities, sightseeing and visiting friends and family, at weekends, festival holidays and other holidays.

Mobile methods highlight how research should analyse those processes by which co-presence and intimacy are on occasions brought about, and the socialities involved when people are not involved in daily interactions with each other but with whom a sense of connection is sensed and sustained. If social networks are becoming more dispersed and people are less able to visit one another on a daily or even weekly basis, then we cannot equate closeness and communion with geographical nearness and daily or weekly co-present visits. Long-distance leisurely travel (albeit often very hectic) is important to research for its social and emotional significance. Despite being less frequent, long-distance travel can be as significant as everyday short-distance trips.

In the past much leisure travel could have been classified as touristic and by implication unnecessary. But now it seems that affordable, reliable and well-connected tourist-type travel is necessary for friendship and family life, social inclusion and social capital. We examine to what degree leisure travel involves reconnecting with friends and family members living elsewhere, rather than only seeing new and interesting places. We label this tourism proximity and suggest that visiting friends and relatives (VFR) tourism is an important contemporary element of travel and one increasing in significance.

Mobile methods are distinct from typical transport research by highlighting how studies of the physical movement of people and objects must be supplemented by studies of imaginative, virtual and communication travel. We are also concerned with the methods used to research the socialities involved in communications, by letter, phone, email and text message, that take place in-between physical meetings. Even people li...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures, Maps and Tables
• Preface
• 1 Researching Networks and Travel: An Introduction
• 2 Social Networks
• 3 Meetings and Networks
• 4 Mobilities
• 5 Research Design
• 6 Geographies of Networks and Mobilities
• 7 Travel and Meetings
• 8 Coordinating Networks and Travel
• 9 Research and Policy Futures
• Appendix A Distances To and Locations of Significant Others
• Appendix B Distribution of Distances by Rank
• References
• Index