Abstract
This article introduces the Special Issue Mobile Elites: Sojourners, Dwellers and Homecomers, in which five articles look into the hidden frictions and social and emotional costs involved in privileged forms of mobility. Such existentially oriented aspects of globalization are still relatively underresearched. It is argued that cultural studies hold a responsibility to carry out ethnographically oriented analyses of mobile elite groups in order to unveil the complexities of life trajectories commonly associated with social as well as economic success. The article outlines an epistemological platform for carrying out such analyses, combining the new mobilities paradigm with social field theory and social phenomenology. Based on the empirical analyses presented in the Special Issue, the article also introduces three ‘registers of ambiguity and negotiation’: ambiguities of moral geographies, ambiguities of re-embedding and ambiguities of flow-architectures.
Global travel and longer stays abroad are often seen as the signs of individual freedom and social success. Geographical mobility, related to, for example, work and education, may be an important ingredient to the trajectories of groups who want to gain higher status. Among those who are already established in affluent positions, internationally oriented careers and extensive leisure travel may be seen as mandatory. What they have in common is that they move because they want to. As opposed to refugees and large shares of migrant work forces, they are not forced to leave their homelands but hold the privilege to enter and exit foreign countries without taking any major risks. In spite of these privileges, however, the mobile lives of the upper and middle classes should neither be taken at face value as plain success stories, nor should they be understood as a homogeneous phenomenon that looks the same across the board. Cultural studies have an obligation to look as reflexively into these life forms as into the lives of subordinated, marginal and alternative groups. This Special Issue addresses three overarching questions intended to critically explore what is hidden behind the luxurious facades of mobile elites:
To what extent are these groups really free, and under what premises?
What are the costs of mobility in terms of emotional and social sacrifices, and how do different groups handle them?
What are the underlying forces (cultural, economic, technological, etc.) that may invoke frictions, restraints and uncertainties to seemingly emancipated mobilities?
In order to get a diversified picture of this problem area, which has so far been given relatively little attention in cultural studies, this Special Issue gathers five articles focussing on different groups and different forms of elite mobility.1 The contributions introduce us to the lifeworlds of British lifestyle migrants in France as well as to the global itineraries of Swedish business travellers. They look into the unsettling homecomings of formerly East German citizens as well as the securitized mobilities of Western expats in Bangalore and the mediatized life trajectories of Scandinavian expatriates in Geneva. In this introductory article, I want to frame and think together these studies. First, I introduce the problem area through a discussion of the social developments, and the state of research, that provide the background to our research questions. Second, I sketch a general theoretical framework that defines the common agenda of the analyses. It means that I identify three main research strands through which we can attain deeper knowledge about the enigmatic lifeworlds of mobile elites. Third, I synthesize the findings of the five articles through the identification of key registers in which various ambiguities and social negotiations are played out.
Setting the scene: the hidden frictions of affluent mobilities
Globalization research holds that one of the key shifts of the current, late modern phase of the globalization process is the transformation of class structures. There are two primary facets to this shift. First, the development from highly (inter)national economies to more transnational or global structures, with less clear-cut territorial boundaries and orders of control, is related to the emergence of new influential class fractions, whose status stems from their capacities in managing ‘economies of signs and space’ (Lash and Urry, 1994). A central feature of these classes, including the ‘new middle classes’ and ‘creative classes’ as well as the sheer elite groups of the global knowledge and information economy (e.g. Robinson and Harris, 2000; Rofe, 2003), is their transnational character, reflected both in their expanding symbolic competences and their extended modes of mobility and interaction.
Second, the conditions of older elite groups (and institutions), such as those of the industrial and political spheres, are challenged, especially in the sense that instant communication and global networking have taken on a much stronger presence, demanding high degrees of reflexivity, mobility and networking (e.g. Beaverstock et al., 2004; Carroll, 2009; Sheller and Urry, 2003). This is what Urry has highlighted in his account of the growing significance of network capital (see Elliott and Urry, 2010; Urry, 2007), and what others have tried to capture with the term cosmopolitan capital (Bühlmann et al., 2013; Igarashi and Saito, 2014). Network capital refers to all those resources that enable people to move and make contacts in smooth and controllable ways, such as efficient communication devices, appropriate travel documents and visas, and access to convenient meeting places (Urry, 2007: 197–198). Cosmopolitan capital, while lacking a broadly shared definition, is typically referring to embodied capabilities and attributes, such as language skills, international experiences and educational degrees, that make social agents better equipped to navigate the world geographically, socially and culturally (see, for example, Bühlmann et al., 2013; Igarashi and Saito, 2014; Jansson, 2011; Kennedy, 2009).
These transformations are inter-related and can be understood as an expression of the metaphysics of flow that permeate modern culture and society (Cresswell, 2006), entailing a celebration and normalization of flexibility, lightness and just-in-time management of anything from industrial production to self-identities and professional careers (Tomlinson, 2007). Bauman (2000, 2006) has famously diagnosed late modern society as a society where liquidity is successively replacing assets like solidity and durability, which characterized the era of high industrialism. Under such conditions mobility in itself, as well as the distribution of mobility resources, are awarded intensified symbolic and political significance (Cresswell, 2010). Who are able to move and who are not? Which forms of mobility count as valuable and which do not? The mobilities of privileged groups hold a key role here, both as a material and economic force and as a referential framework for how people in general may envision certain forms of travelling as part of the ‘good life’. As Birtchnell and Caletrío (2014) put it, [b]ecause the few play a formative role in how and why mobilities happen their own forms of movement become foundational, referential, or simply ‘normal’ ingredients within the flow-architectures of society, empowering some to be more mobile at the expense of others. (p. 2)
Culture and materiality blend together. The worldwide expansion of these structuring flow-architectures, the ‘networking of the world’ (Mattelart, 2000), includes anything from efficient airline systems and amenities for international and inter-urban transit to digital information and communication infrastructures, which provide both the invisible sub-structures (cables, pipes, servers, etc.) and the celebratory manifestations (airport lounges, luxury hotels, personal media devices, etc.) of a society on the move.
Then, an entirely different type of question emerges. How does it feel to be among the happy few who can benefit the most from these structured and structuring spaces of flow? What do we know about the dreams and anxieties of the busy travellers whose lightness so many of us tend to envy? Whereas flow-architectures constitute material and cultural forces of mobility, they also make up the lifeworlds of mobile elites. They provide spaces that are on the one hand standardized and tailored for frictionless passage (see Augé, 1995), enabling rest, security and connectedness while on the move. On the other hand, they are potential sources of boredom, homesickness and frustration. As Elliott and Urry (2010) argue, although there is evidence that indicates the rise of a new global elite as a superclass, what is absent from recent discussions is any sustained consideration of the ‘experiential texture’ of the lives of globals, as well as the richly networked individualism that such lives entail. (Italics in original) (p. 67)
As other scholars have pointed out too, among them Moores and Metykova (2010), Mau (2010) and Bude and Dürrschmidt (2010), the academic fascination with flows and networking that has long permeated globalization theory must be countered, and complemented, by a deeper scrutiny of the nature and enduring significance of phenomena such as strong ties, spatial attachments, love, intimacy and other forms of socio-emotional commitments that saturate seemingly liquidized lifeworlds (cf. Bauman, 2000, 2003). As Bude and Dürrschmidt (2010) argue, in spite of the prevalence of new media and networking resources ‘there is a continuing significance of ‘everyday territory’ that requires routine presence and practical recurrence, in other words, a rather well-mapped out familiar space in which one is indeed “there, in touch, with all one’s senses”’ (p. 490). Focusing on those issues, Bude and Dürrschmidt continue, ‘is an attempt to recall the emotional costs and affective loss involved in these social trajectories [among mobile groups], something which is largely ignored by much of globalization theory’ (p. 491).
Altogether, these observations highlight the need for a phenomenologically informed understanding of the social, spatial and emotional negotiations that mark the lifestyles and lifeworlds of contemporary mobile elite groups and the role played by various means and architectures of mobility and communication within these processes. This is not to say, however, that rootedness, immobility and enduring family relationships are to be thought of as the ‘natural’ basis for security and closeness, as often implied by phenomenological versions of human geography (see e.g. Relph, 1976; Seamon, 1979; see also Cresswell, 2006; Moores, 2012, for critical accounts). As argued in other, more nomadic branches of social theory, one cannot rule out the possibility that people may establish strong senses of proximity also under conditions of transnational dispersal (Vertovec, 2009) and that a sense of ‘home’ in the strict geographical sense may not even be an essential social desire – the social world made accessible electronically and the laptop becoming a Heimat itself for certain groups and individuals (e.g. Morley, 2000).
Compared to other mobile groupings, from backpackers to diaspora communities, the life conditions of those groups marked by status and privilege have so far rendered relatively little attention. Such elite groups, speaking in relative terms, involve a variety of class fractions, located in different social fields, as well as diverse forms of mobility and (trans)migration. As Birtchnell and Caletrío (2014) argue, such mobilities are important to understand not only in their own right, but also because they attain a residual quality; they are ‘hegemonic in their impacts on other forms of movement and in the size of their ecological footprints’ (p. 4). This Special Issue gathers analyses that compensate for the obvious limitations of existing research, together producing a complex picture of this privileged social landscape.
Framing the lifeworlds of mobile elites
The problem area of this Special Issue is given already by the title. The question concerns what kinds of social and emotional ambiguities arise within the lifeworlds of mobile elites, and for what reasons. The contributions pertain (in different ways) to three such figures of privileged global mobility. First, there are sojourners, who spend shorter or longer periods in other countries because of, for example, professional projects or tourism-related seasonal activities. Second, there are dwellers, who lead expatriate lifestyles connected to their careers and set down roots in new places where they might stay for several years. Third, there are homecomers; those who have decided to resettle in their country of origin after having completed longer periods abroad. These figures appear in different guises in the five articles, actualizing different positions along the home-away continuum and different social and existential dilemmas.
While the empirical orientations of the essays diverge they are theoretically gathered at the intersection of three broad research strands: (1) the new mobilities paradigm, as advocated by Sheller and Urry (2006); (2) social field theory, originally introduced by Bourdieu (1990 [1980]), here broadly conceived; and (3) social phenomenology, following the legacy of Schütz (1967 [1932]). Each article applies additional theoretical underpinnings as well – such as gender studies and theories of emotion and mediatization – depending on the case in question, but on a basic level they feed into these three areas. Altogether, the articles contribute to the interlinked discussions around the current nature and consequences of global mobilities; the transforming structures of social privilege and eliteness, and the growing complexity of everyday life. Before I turn to a synthesization of the arguments, it is important to provide an overview of these overlapping research strands.
First, the rationale for speaking of a new mobilities paradigm has to do with the fact that more and more lives and organizations are concerned with issues of movement – ‘of too little or too much’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006: 208) – in areas as diverse as migration, tourism, terrorism and media software development. This social penetration of mobility issues and problems has led to a ‘mobility turn’ within the social sciences, ‘putting social relations into travel and connecting different forms of transport with complex patterns of social experience conducted through communication-at-a-distance’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006). It is to this programmatic statement we can trace Urry’s (2007: Ch 9) concept of network capital, socially manifested through, for instance, a worldwide social network, appropriate documents and visas, communication devices, and ‘appropriate, safe and secure meeting places’ (Urry, 2007: 198). The articles of this Special Issue are closely related to this paradigm (which they also problematize), both at the general epistemological level and in the sense that the status of mobile elites can be understood as the actualization of network capital in relation to other sources of power, and thus part of the general ‘politics of mobility’ (Cresswell, 2010).
There are two sub-areas of mobility research that incorporate analyses of direct relevance to this Special Issue: the study of mobile/transnational lives and the study of mobile media in social life. The growing importance of these sub-areas has come to surface through the relatively recent emergence of journals such as Global Networks and Mobile Media and Communication. From these contexts, the contributors of this Special Issue draw understandings of the negotiated socio-emotional nature, or ‘liquid life paths’ (Mas Giralt and Bailey, 2010), of dispersed transnational families (e.g. Chamberlain and Leydersdorff, 2004; Igarashi, 2015; Parreñas, 2005; Yeoh and Willis, 2012) as well as the identity processes among professional expatriates and lifestyle migrants (e.g. Beaverstock, 2002; Benson and Osbaldiston, 2014; Kennedy, 2009; Ley, 2004; Nowicka, 2007; Wiles, 2008). They also draw on analyses of how media uses play into the shaping of mobilities and the re-constitution of social bonds and local attachments among people on the move (e.g. Andersson, 2008, 2013; Christensen and Jansson, 2015; Diminescu, 2008; Elliott and Urry, 2010; Georgiou, 2006; Jansson, 2011; Licoppe, 2004; Madianou and Miller, 2012; Moores and Metykova, 2010; Morley, 2000; Wilding, 2006). In sum, the emerging mobilities paradigm contributes to our cumulative understanding of the relationally defined status of mobile elites, illuminating which forms of mobility count as valuable (and which do not) and how mobile experiences and life trajectories are embedded in technological infrastructures.
This brings us to social field theory, which constitutes our second main research strand. This approach, based on Bourdieu’s (1984 [1979], 1990 [1980]) theorization of different forms of capital and power, is valuable first of all as a way of conceptualizing ‘eliteness’ in a dynamic way. As Savage and Williams (2008) argue in their introduction to Remembering Elites, Bourdieu’s theoretical tools ‘provide a new means of understanding elites, not as fixed, traditional pillars, but as a group of intermediaries whose power rests on being able to forge connections and bridge gaps’ (p. 4). Eliteness can thus mean different things and be based on different types of resources in different contexts. What we need to ask, then, is how does mobility co-constitute power, and vice versa?
Whereas as terms like network capital (Elliott and Urry, 2010; Urry, 2007), motility (Kaufmann, 2002) and cosmopolitan capital (e.g. Bühlmann et al., 2013; Weenink, 2008) can be helpful for unpacking the power of mobility, they do not suffice for detailing the variety of elite positions that might be labelled ‘mobile’. Urry (2007) holds that network capital is not only ‘a prerequisite for living in the rich “north” of contemporary capitalism’, but also ‘develops into a distinct field with characteristic struggles, tastes and habituses’ (p. 196). However, this statement is not accompanied by enough empirical evidence or any elaborated framework that fully resonate with Bourdieu’s (1984 [1979], 1990 [1980]) advanced approach to the logic of fields. In this Special Issue, several contributors adopt Bourdieu’s theory of social fields, habitus and social space for conducting class analyses that account for the interplay between material resources, modes of social interaction and cultural practice (taste and distinctions) in different realms of the mobile world. The underlying assumption here is that different social fields incorporate different logics of legitimization and socio-cultural recognition, and thus also, in tandem with, for example, gender structures and geopolitical power geometries, foster differential modes of mobility, spatial appropriation and sociality (see also Glick-Schiller and Salazar, 2013).
Whether to speak of distinct cosmopolitan or transnational fields (see, for example, Levitt and Glick-Schiller, 2004; Waters, 2005; Christensen and Jansson, 2015; Jansson, 2013a) thus remains an empirical question, and some of the articles address the role of social contexts and status hierarchies without explicitly adopting Bourdieusian field theory. What is common to all articles, however, is that they promote an inside view of how social and geographical trajectories, as well as the socio-cultural status of different means of mobility and communication are negotiated in relation to structural forces and constraints (cf. Andersson, 2008, 2013; Horst, 2006; Madianou and Miller, 2012; Panagakos and Horst, 2006). Seemingly frictionless mobilities may incorporate contradictory and sometimes unsettling experiences where autonomy becomes inseparable from dependence and where dreams of open-ended self-realization blur with normalized institutional pressures.
Third, following Bude and Dürrschmidt’s (2010) call for an ‘existential turn’ in globalization theory, as well as Tomlinson’s (1999) arguments for situated analyses of cultural (re)territorialization processes and Moores’ (2012) advocacy of an ‘orientation and habitation paradigm’ in media studies, the articles of this Special Issue turn to phenomenological perspectives. The underlying sources of inspiration here are mainly Schütz’s (1967 [1932]) phenomenology of the lifeworld, as well as Bourdieu’s work on habitus, space and embodiment (see especially Bourdieu, 2000 [1997]) and certain areas of human geography, notably Tuan’s (1974) work on topophilia, ‘the love of place’. While not all of the articles engage with these sources explicitly, phenomenological concerns are fundamental to our problem area and to the general epistemological take on globalization processes supported here. Even though many researchers have stressed the need to take into consideration the continuous emotional investments that people make in certain spaces, places and materialities, as well as in their social relations, in order to better understand the frictions and anxieties of mobile and mediatized life conditions, there are still many hidden areas to uncover. Notably, we ought to reflect systematically on the nature of emotional and existential dilemmas, and how they pertain to phenomenological and/or social-constructivist accounts of, for instance, everyday cosmopolitanism and altered perceptions of space and place in mediatized lifeworlds (see, for example, Hepp, 2013; Meyrowitz, 1985; Scannell, 1996; Jansson, 2013b).
It is important to point out that the phenomenological (or existential) turn is not just a turn to the micro-level of globalization processes. As given by Bude and Dürrschmidt’s (2010) postulations contra ‘flow-speak’, our deeper theoretical and empirical engagement with actually lived mobile experiences holds the potential to problematize simplified divisions between the metaphysics of fixity and flow (Cresswell, 2006). On a discursive and ideological level, one may assert that the metaphysics of flow have come to take centre-stage in our globalized world. Sedentary lifestyles of people in ‘small places’ in the countryside are seen as romantic remnants of a bygone era, and groups who are not keen on following the demands on flexibility and mobility in the job market are often dismissed as ‘problematic’. But this does not rule out the possibility that we may identify sedentary orientations and sentiments in the midst of global flows (and vice versa), if we just scratch the surface and allow mobile people to open themselves. The desire for stillness, tranquillity and communion may hold a strong presence not just among tourists and lifestyle migrants who search for paradisiac places where they can spend their holidays or senior years (see e.g. Salazar, 2010). Deeper social relations are ultimately reliant on a certain level of co-presence and intimacy. Schütz (1967 [1932]) describes the We-relationship as a social instance of converging spatiality and temporality, when ‘you and I are immediately involved with each other […] living in our common stream of consciousness’ (p. 167). This mode of interaction, and its existential significance, is worthwhile to problematize in relation to lifestyles marked by high levels of mobility and mediated interaction at-a-distance. Taking the perspective of mobile subjects themselves implies, as Kalir (2013) argues, that we can problematize some of the taken for granted assumptions that prevail within the mobilities paradigm, for instance when it comes to the motivations of international mobility and what it means to cross national, as well as other, borders under different social conditions.
Registers of ambiguity and negotiation
As already mentioned, this Special Issue contains five contributions. In the first article, Karin Fast and Johan Lindell explore the mobile world of Swedish business people, whose lifestyles are torn between professional demands on regular international business trips and sedentary values of home and family-life. In the following article, Erika Polson presents an ethnographic account of the micro-mobilities of female expatriates in Bangalore, analysing especially how location-based technologies influence their modes of navigating the city in a safe way. After that André Jansson introduces a critical view of how mediatization, understood as growing media dependence, affects the social and geographical trajectories of Scandinavian expatriates working within the United Nations (UN) system. In the fourth article, Michaela Benson provides a problematized view of the privileged mobility of British lifestyle migrants in France, exploring the emotional ambiguities that emerge at the intersections of lifestyle imageries and local realities. In the final article, Jörg Dürrschmidt gives a phenomenological account of the uneasy feelings of German homecomers who find themselves out of tune and out of sync with the local life forms to which they return after international careers.
Instead of providing abstract-like presentations of each contribution, I will introduce the main arguments of this Special Issue by means of a synthesized view where I briefly discuss three overarching ‘registers of ambiguity and negotiation’. These registers are not to be taken as ultimate conclusions, but should be seen as a humble step towards a more coherent analytical agenda and framework for studying the contradictory lifeworlds of mobile elites, which may in turn lead us towards a problematized view of how mobility both reproduces and interrupts social privilege.
Ambiguities of moral geographies
The first register concerns the general experience of and attitude towards mobility per se among mobile subjects, what Cresswell (2006) refers to as ‘moral geographies’. Whereas international mobility is often seen as a mandatory part of professional life and/or a desired leisure activity, mobile lifestyles do not come naturally. Some groups may also feel more at ease with certain forms of mobility compared to others. Fast and Lindell depict business travellers who in the most accentuated cases state that there is ‘absolutely nothing’ pleasurable about travelling. It is rather a necessary evil that comes with their careers, linked to the fact that they have to maintain international business connections. One may of course argue that certain types of travelling are simply boring, such as, repeated visits to the same congress centres or meeting venues, where travel time largely becomes time to kill and destinations represent the same type of ‘work-scapes’ one has just left. One may also argue that regular long-distance travelling in the longer run becomes quite tiresome. However, Fast and Lindell also identify deeper strokes of sedentarism among some of their informants, desires to spend as much time as possible in the home-place and with their families. This finding can be contrasted with Jansson’s analyses of expatriates working for UN organizations in Geneva. Among these informants, the basic orientation is nomadic. They are struggling to make family-life work (in cases where there is a family constellation), but they are not inclined to give up travelling since that aspect has been a central motivation of their careers all along.
These examples illustrate that mobile subjects are involved in continuous negotiations of centrifugal versus centripetal forces in their lives. Some of these forces are external, related to the metaphysics of fixity and flow that Cresswell (2006) discusses. The growing, even hegemonic, significance of network capital or cosmopolitan capital, particularly salient in certain transnational social fields, as Jansson argues, can be seen as a centrifugal force that turns mobility into the normal state. Others come ‘from within’ the individuals themselves and are tied to their habitus. Among the UN professionals, nomadic life trajectories are in strikingly many cases ‘inherited’ from parents or in other ways shaped through early socialization. They thus tend to feel that they are ‘in sync’ with the moral geographies of their fields. This is not the case (at least not to the same extent) among the mobile business elite persons. In consequence, through the negotiation of various forces, mobility becomes ‘elastic’, as Fast and Lindell hold, giving rise to fluctuations of social and existential ambiguity that have to be handled.
Ambiguities of re-embedding
The second register is partly related to the question of habitus and concerns experiences of what we may call ‘fractured identities’. In his article on homecomers of East German origin, Dürrschmidt advances a phenomenological view of how these subjects feel ‘out of tune’ when they try to readapt to social expectations that are tied to their original home-place and rooted in visions that took shape at an earlier stage of their life trajectories. Dürrschmidt depicts how habitus may undergo change through global, potentially cosmopolitanizing, life-experiences and thus clash with social realities once it is confronted with more place-based, or sedentary, life forms – even though these life forms are deeply familiar as an integral part of habitus itself. Such experiences of social re-embedding (Giddens, 1991) can be existentially unsettling, and as Dürrschmidt points out, in an era of extended mobilities they are also becoming an increasingly normalized aspect of modern life. Mobile subjects, even those who are involved in voluntary, privileged forms of sojourning, may feel a strong sense of longing, or simply homesickness, in relation to their places of origin. But the transformation of habitus may turn homecoming into a more complicated matter than imagined.
Another facet of the same register comes to expression in Benson’s study of British lifestyle migrants in rural France. In this case, the experience of unease is primarily linked to the contrast between phantasmagorical projections of a future comfortable lifestyle and feelings of being cut-off from social life in general and friends and family in Britain in particular. Lifestyle migration probably constitutes the area par excellence where the mythologies of popular culture and normalized narratives of the ‘good life’ become an integral part of identity development and play into the shaping of mobility patterns, for good and for bad. The ambiguous feelings and experiences that Benson uncovers among her British dwellers in France are in this sense acquainted with the disappointment found among tourists who have established an inner, pre-mediated vision of a certain destination and a week-long vacation, which then fail to live up to the expectations (e.g. Salazar, 2010). But there are also more structural factors at play. As Benson points out, the negative feelings among her lifestyle migrants are not linked to for instance weather conditions or practical amenities. They are connected to deeper structures of belonging and non-belonging. If people invest much of their identity into the fateful project of moving abroad and perhaps taking up an alternative professional career, then failing to feel at home becomes a social failure.
Polson’s fieldwork among privileged female expats in Bangalore further underscores the structural repercussions involved in re-embedding processes and the challenges involved in maintaining a sense of individual continuity in the midst of change, in her case associated with gender. It is not just that the new socio-cultural context of expats may imply that their identities are measured according to new, different standards, for example, being treated in a degrading way because of being a woman and thus finding it difficult to proceed ‘naturally’ with private and professional duties. The contextually invoked over-identification with a particular gender and cultural origin, articulated for instance through ritualized forms of interaction with women of similar socio-cultural background as oneself, may stand in the way for building those bridges between self and other that are often part and parcel of expatriate imageries.
Ambiguities of flow-architectures
The third prominent register is, somewhat ironically, played out in relation to the infrastructures and specially designed environments, or flow-architectures, that underpin privileged mobilities, enhancing the smoothness, security and comfort of lives largely lived away from home (Birtchnell and Caletrío, 2014). These architectures include for instance advanced systems of aeromobility (Budd, 2014), designed areas of accommodation and retreat, including various forms of gated communities (Córdoba Azcárate et al., 2014; Thurlow and Jaworski, 2014) and new information and communication technologies. Fast and Lindell provide good examples of the general sense of emptiness that easily arises when much time is spent in transit, in spite of the speed and comfort enabled by new technologies and services. Similarly, Polson points to ambiguities felt in relation to the ‘expat bubble’, that is, the socially, geographically and architecturally (segre)gated forms of dwelling that often characterize expatriate life forms (especially in developing/transitory societies), where everyday life is experienced as cut-off from the rest of society and culture and thus more or less artificial. Polson also makes the important point that whereas new media technologies and locative services facilitate various forms of micro-mobility among expatriate subjects, thus potentially promoting encounters with other groups in society, they also give rise to a new kind of technological ‘bubble’. In Polson’s study, the smooth access to smartphone technology reproduces the privilege of expats and articulates their central position within glocal power geometries.
Flow architectures thus tend to have socially and culturally encapsulating effects that go against the cosmopolitan ethos of certain mobile elite groups (Jansson, 2011). As argued in Jansson’s article, this general observation can be related to the current debates around the significance of mediatization as a prevailing social force and meta-process of modern society (Krotz, 2007). In relation to global mobilities, new media systems constitute a key facilitator of extended networks and the maintenance of close social bonds and senses of proximity with dear ones. They can thus be seen as emancipatory in as much as they lower the emotional costs involved in being physically away from friends and family on a regular basis and/or for longer periods. At the same time, however, digital media contribute to the expansion of social fields, meaning that there might actually be less space for negotiating mobility and less time for private life. Jansson’s analysis shows that the appropriation of media within certain social fields, in this case the UN system, involves the normalization of new media dependences that are often experienced as stressful and encapsulating, especially if there are no formalized demands or modes of conduct specified by the organization. Similarly, as also shown by Fast and Lindell in their analysis of business elites, digital media platforms are typically seen as preconditions for keeping mobile jobs, but can rarely compensate in the long run for experiences of longing.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Swedish Research Council, project number B0185501.
Biographical note
André Jansson is a professor of media and communication studies at Karlstad University. He is the director of the Geomedia Research Group. His latest book (co-authored with Miyase Christensen) is Cosmopolitanism and the Media: Cartographies of Change (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).