[SOUND] [FOREIGN]. >> Moving forward. >> My life as an academic involves traveling to interesting places, to conferences, to workshops to give lectures, to see exhibitions to develop collaborations. Even to write books with people on topics like mobile lives, but of course my travel is mirrors and patterns and is similar to the pattern of many other people. Sometimes it seems as if all the world is on the move, the early retired, international students, terrorists, members of diasporas, holiday makers, business people, sports stars, asylum seekers, refugees, and so on. These and many others seem to find the contemporary world is their oyster or at least destiny. Criss crossing the globe are the root ways of these many groups intermittently encountering each other in transportation and communication hubs. Searching out in real and electronic databases for the next coach message, plane back of lorry text. Train, bus, lift a car, website, and so on. The state of this traveling seems immense. There are a billion legal international arrivals each year compared with 25 million in 1950. There are at least 4 million air passengers each day. At any one time there's between 3 and 400,000 people in flight above the United States, equivalent to a city in the sky. There are many refugees. And today, world citizens moved 23 billion kilometers and if resource constraints don't get in the way it's predicted that by 2050, 40 years, I say 40 years' time, it's predicted that figure would have increased four fold to 106 billion. People don't necessarily spend more time traveling, but they are traveling faster. The amount of time people spend traveling seems to have remained more of less constant if you average it out across the world's population as about one hour or so a day. Also people that necessarily seem to make more journeys but it's that when they do make journeys, they use powerful machines to make those journeys and thus travel much greater distances. This industry of travel and tourism is really the world's largest industry, whether you measure it by the size of the employed population or the proportion of the global income that's it generates. And these sort of patterns of fast movement seem to affect almost all countries around the world, with travel statistics now for at least 200 countries, with most countries receiving and sending significant numbers of travelers. An interesting writer, Schivelbusch, a German scholar overall concludes that for the 20th century traveler, the world has become one large department store of countrysides and cities. Although, of course, this huge variation in degree to which any particular set of people can voluntarily sample at department store on a regular basis. This sort of pattern of mainly, but not entirely voluntary travel is the largest ever peaceful movement of people across borders. And even with significant interruptions in these systems, that has, until very recently, not substantially abated. So being physically mobile has been for which are people and even for some poorer people, a way of life around the globe. And at the same time that people are moving, so of course, materials are also on the move often carried by these moving people, openinly or inadvertently, or illegally. And the multinational sourcing of different components and manufactured products also involves just in time delivery from around the world. So, these converging mobile machines appear to be transforming many aspects of economic and social life. That are in a sense on the move or away from home. And there are, in this sort of mobile world, many complex connections between physical travel, these forms of physical travel. And modes of communication forming new fluid patterns, often difficult to pin down to stabilize. And some people say these physical changes appear to be dematerializing connections, as people, machines, images, information, power, money, ideas and, indeed, risks are on the move, making and remaking connections at often rapid speed around the world. So in all of this, issues of movement of too little movement for some people, too much movement for others. All the wrong sorts of movement or movements at the wrong time become more central to many people's lives and to the operations of both small and large, public, private, and non-governmental organizations. And there are many issues here to do with mobility, which have become center stage. In response to these development many writers have begun to mobilize a mobilities turn. A way of sort of thinking and analyzing these processes. Thinking through the character of economic, social and political relationships in the contemporary world. This mobilities turn is spreading in and through the social sciences, mobilizing analysis that had historically been static, fixed, and concerned with, predominantly, a spacial social structures. This mobility turn is post-disciplinary, sort of beyond the individual separate disciplines and concerned with the multiple ways in which economic, social, political life is performed and organized through time and across many complex spaces. And that analysis of the complex ways that social relations are stretched across the globe are generating theories, research findings, and methods. That mobilize or are coming to assemble analyses of social order that are achieved in part on the move and contingently. Overall, these mobilities have been mainly a black box for the social sciences. Generally regarded as sort of neutral technologies that permit forms of economic, social, and political life, that need to be explained by more significant kinds of courses. But to the extent to which transport and communications has been studied, they've often been placed in separate categories with little interchange with the rest of the social science. Holiday making, walking, car driving, phoning, and so on have been, until rather recently, ignored by the social sciences. Although they are manifestly significant for people's everyday lives, and indeed that's every day lives, social institutions, social practices, all presuppose complex patterns of movement through time and across space. This mobility is also each presupposed a systems. Systems make possible movement. The systems provide the anticipation that you can make the journey. That the message will arrive, that the parcel will get there, that the family group can meet up. Systems thus permit predictable and relatively risk-free repetition of the movements in question. And in the contemporary world, obviously, there are many such systems including ticketing, oil supplies, addresses, safety, protocols, websites, money transfer systems, inclusive tour, and so on. These are repetitive systems, they sort of keep the repetition going, and they make it seem natural to be able to make the journey, to be able to see your friends or family. For people to be able to move and for them in order to move objects and so on is to have access to these relatively secure, regulated, and risk free systems. There were a number of systems that have been significant and one very striking growth of subsystems occurred around 1840. When the first railway system was being built in England, the first package tour took place in 1841. The development of the first national post system. The invention of photography in France and then in England. And the first railway, first railway hotel. And also the first system of steam ships crossing the Atlantic. All took place in one to two year period. So suddenly, there were these astonishing series of mobility systems. And of course, the 20th century saw many other mobility systems developing, including the car system, national telephone system, air power, high speed trains, electricity, modern urban systems, mobile phones, and so on. And as we move into the new century, there are a number of features of such systems. They're getting more and more complicated. They are made up of many elements and based upon an array of often specialized forms of expertise. They are increasingly interdependent with each other. So that's an individual journey presupposes a whole series of interdependent systems working coherently together. Also, certainly from the 1970s onward, those systems have become increasingly computer-dependent and particularly dependent upon specialist forms of software. And finally, and kind of problematically, many of these systems because of their interdependence are vulnerable to what have been called normal accidents. Accidents that are almost certain to occur [COUGH] from time to time given the ways in which [COUGH] these systems are tightly locked in together. So as people's patterns of lives have become more differentiated from each other, more distinct, so they paradoxically depend more and more on these systems, these systems working. So organizing, meeting up with others with family, friends, colleagues, and so on because those family, friends, and colleagues are spatially distributed. So it requires more and more coordination, and it requires coordination through these diverse systems that have to be working, have to be in place, that have to be providing the anticipation that they will be functioning. So personalization and system dependence is a particular feature of the mobility turn. [SOUND] >> [FOREIGN]
