• Mobility among Young Urban Dwellers Mette Jensen
• Reconstructing the meanings of travelling among young people in modern Russia Zuev Denis
• Mobility, identity and connectivity Julian Hine (paper available)
• Space, Communication and the Daily exercise of solidarity: An Exploration of Distributed Discourse in the cyber campaigns of fire fighters in the UK John Hogan, Andreja Zivkovic (paper available)
• Hagerstrand, hegemony and distributed discourse: the use of the worldwideweb in tracking contemporary migration paths Margaret Grieco (paper available)
• The skill of travel: Networks into neighbourhoods Steve Little, Len Holmes, Frank Go (paper available)

Mobility among Young Urban Dwellers

Mette Jensen, DMU - National Environmental Research Institute (Denmark)

Young people of today travel and are as mobile as never before. They have a considerable appetite for travelling and practically unlimited opportunities for mobility. Not only the physical/bodily travelling, but also virtual travels via the Internet, or communicative travels via e-mail, (mobile) phones, etc. (Urry, 2002) are separately and in combination a marked feature in everyday life among young people (Tully, 2002). To today's youth, mobility is a fact of life that they embrace with enthusiasm and, in a number of ways, mobility sets the agenda for and constantly transforms their social life. It influences their way of perceiving and understanding the world, which in turn makes them demand a still more and increasingly complex mobility.

The present paper is based on a study of the meaning of mobility in modern everyday life (Jensen, 2001). The study included two groups, one consisted of busy adults, seen as the carriers of tendencies in time, and the other consisted of young people, seen as carriers of the future. The paper will focus on the latter group.

Author can be contacted at mje@dmu.dk

Reconstructing the meanings of travelling among young people in modern Russia

Zuev Denis (Russia)

Author can be contacted at tungus66@mail.ru

Mobility, identity and connectivity

Julian Hine, University of Ulster (UK)

Changing patterns and types of mobility resulting from advances in transportation and communication technology have important consequences for interactions across time and space. This paper discusses the way in which mobility and connectivity shapes the social and economic dynamics of identity and community, within the context of daily travel or mobility. Transportation systems and technological development have serious implications firstly for mobility and the resulting compression of time-space, and the liberation of time with increased opportunities, and secondly, the speed of interactions within and across time-space. Transportation, and as a consequence mobility, shape identity. New information and communication technologies (ICT) have implications for how commitments are structured. Importantly new ICT provides an additional feature that allows identity to be managed and also to be of non-place.

Full paper available in pdf format (70kb) from HERE

Space, Communication and the Daily exercise of solidarity: An Exploration of Distributed Discourse in the cyber campaigns of fire fighters in the UK

John Hogan, University of Hertfordshire, UK, Andreja Zivkovic, University of Cambridge (UK)

This paper examines the use of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) by Firefighters in the UK to generate solidarity and maintain collectivism. This is pursued through the examination of how ICTs were utilised in the conduct of the national industrial dispute that raged within Britain's fire service between 2002 and 2003. It seeks to conceptualise this rich experience of cyber-organisation through the use of the analytical template of distributed discourse. From this perspective ICT has profound implications for collective deliberation and organisation, in that it facilitates communication to occur rapidly, at low and distributed cost; attenuating the time-space poverty of participants by allowing for asynchronous communicative exchanges and by bringing together those separated by distance. Flows of information may now escape institutional boundaries as never before. The communicative possibilities are for more extensive interaction, greater density of communication, sharper visibility and higher levels of transparency. Through the examination of official and unofficial firefighters web sites, combined with virtual and real time in-depth interviews with key actors, this paper examines the specific domain of union governance, and suggests that tendencies towards oligarchy (sustained by control over the flow of information, access to superior knowledge, skill in the art of politics and a membership diverted by the pulls of work, family and leisure) are challenged by the distributed discourse that lies at the heart of organizing in the information age. In particular, we draw out the possibilities for greater equality of knowledge, distributed control over the means of communication, the enhanced communicative skills of more ordinary union members and a reconfiguration of the time-space dimension of communicative practice. Finally, the paper explores the role that distributed forms of communication and organisation can play in trade union renewal, particularly in promoting participatory democracy and overcoming tendencies to bureaucratic inertia in trade unions.

Full paper available HERE

Hagerstrand, hegemony and distributed discourse: the use of the worldwideweb in tracking contemporary migration paths

Margaret Grieco, Napier University (UK)

Hagerstrand drew our attention to the importance of information paths, and their interaction with social structures, in the diffusion of information. Major alterations in communication technologies have adjusted many of the local specificities and locality constraints on information diffusion that were present in Hagerstrand early analysis. However, the concept of adjacency at the heart of Hagerstand’s understanding remains crucial once the character of electronic adjacency present in contemporary information processes is fully appreciated.

This paper examines the ways in which global eavesdropping on specific mobility paths and patterns affords new directions for mobility research and researchers. It explores the power of new information communication technologies to assist in the reintegration of fragmented histories.

It will focus on seasonal migrant labour in a range of international locations and indicate the importance of developing mobility biographies in the explanation of the shaping of occupational identity and property. Social capital is often viewed as a fixed and local asset -this paper considers the development of migrant social capital and identifies the additional social capital properties that migration on a seasonal and circulatory basis is likely to produce. The paper introduces the concept of structures of encounterability – the intermesh or interweave of mobility biographies and specific place which render identity visible and subject to chronicle.

Abstract available HERE as a 133kb pdf file

The full text of this paper is available at http://www.oocities.org/transport_and_society/stockholm2005.html

The skill of travel: Networks into neighbourhoods

Steve Little, Open University (UK), Len Holmes, London Metropolitan University (UK), Frank Go, Erasmus University, (Netherlands),

This paper will explore the social potential of the complementary flows of people and resources between central and peripheral locations. Tourism generates travel from central to peripheral locations, the search for employment creates travel to centres, the latter generating critical reverse flows of remittance, the former communicating the experience of travel through increasingly convergent digital technologies of video camera, picture-phone and the travel-blogs of "gap year" backpackers. The skill and reward of travel is partly in communicating back to your base.

The paper will argue that the management of these movements and flows in both directions creates new skills and networking capabilities across groups of friends and relatives. These in turn deliver new networked relationships which bind distant locations into virtual neighbourhoods.

Such exchanges have also created a new sense of connection between western tourists and the communities they have visited in the tsunami affected regions of Asia. The response to the disaster contradicts assumptions about "compassion fatigue", and the paper suggests that the forms of adjacency created by such exchanges have transformed "strangers" intro "people like us".

Powerful images and accounts were brought to the rest of the world by the tourist technologies of digital video cameras and cell phones. These technologies permitted a virtual adjacency and also enabled the tracing and tracking of the foreign victims. The same technologies allowed effective warning to reach some communities. Alerted by overseas community members, villagers in the Pondicherry area were able to recall fishing boats and evacuate the danger zone (see http://www.digital-review.org/aud16a.htm).

The paper will explore the distributed and collective nature of the skill set generated by the creation and maintenance of remittance and tourist infrastructures and how these can be harnessed for other uses in both recovery and development.

Abstract available HERE as a 134kb pdf file

The full text of this paper is available here

Stephen Little
Head, Centre for Innovation, Knowledge and Enterprise
Open University Business School
Milton Keynes, U.K.
s.e.little@open.ac.uk

&

Len Holmes, Director,
The Management Research Centre,
London Metropolitan University,
U.K.
l.holmes@londonmet.ac.uk