Introduction to the Kritike Special Issue: Philosophical Thoughts in the Age of High Mobility

Abstract

oday, we are experiencing an unprecedented surge in mobility technologies and a corresponding increase of movement among humans, objects, data, and cultural constructs. Advanced mobile media such as wireless Internet, IoT, small portable devices, as well as renovated conventional vehicles—for example, high-speed trains and autonomous cars—provide us with seemingly unlimited freedom of movement and reflect the unremitting expansion of the global network. However, global mobility disturbance due to Covid-19 emergency triggers the apparent shrinking and blaming of “mobility” on the one hand, but, significantly, encourages us to identify our being mobilized as our supposed “normal status” to be restored, i.e., what we (should) be, on the other. It is the time when mobile technologies condition us and become part of our social life, when motion and movement are embedded in our epistemological, ethical, and aesthetical practices, and when we thus consider not only our existence but also our nature in light of these mobilities. We can denominate this time as the age of high mobility. In the introduction to his seminal book, Being and Motion (2019), Thomas Nail describes the age of high mobility, noting that,