Mobile Socialities

This chapter offers a meta-commentary on the concept of mobile socialites, and on claims that the new technologies of our globalised age have ushered in a borderless world of unprecedented rates of mobility and time-space compression. That vision of how Progress is driven by improvements in the efficiency of transport and communication is here placed in historical context, in an attempt to avoid the dangers of an unself-conscious focus on the present day. The analysis addresses questions concerning how ideas of home and community need to be adapted in the context of contemporary changes in patterns of communication and physical mobility and the changing relations of virtual and material geographies. It focusses on differential mobilities, the politics of waiting - and exclusion- and the continuing significance of place-based modes of sociality. It also discusses the fate of those populations who, rather than exploring any kind of mobile sociality, are increasingly retreating behind sedentarist, particularistic boundaries. The chapter investigates how these desires to to regain some sense of security in a world of flux have provided the seed-bed for the contemporary forms of populism. In conclusion, the argument also considers how the Covid-19 pandemic is reshaping previous debates about both mobility and sociality. Presumptions about the unquestioned value of increased speeds of circulation take on a quite different hue in a context in which the dominant rhetoric is necessarily now one of social distancing and boundary regulation.