ABSTRACT
In recent years, globalization research has moved social and spatial mobilization to the center of attention in social theory. Social, political, economic, and cultural developments geared toward worldwide interconnected structures of interaction and exchange of physical, social, and digital units are interpreted as an allembracing liquefaction of spatial, social, and cultural relations (Sloterdijk 1989; Urry 2000; Bauman 2000; Tomlinson 2003; Cresswell 2006; Urry 2007; Beck 2008; Rosa and Scheuerman 2008; Ritzer 2010). Authors such as David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Anthony Giddens, and Benno Werlen take this as a sign of a shrinking world as a consequence of accelerated and improved transportation and communication technologies and tightly coupled interaction across wide distances, which form what comes very close to ontological foundations of modernization. Harvey coined the term “time-space compression” to describe this. It goes back to Marx’s idea of “annihilation of space by time.” Spaces and spheres that were once clearly separated can now be closely coupled through transportation and IT technologies; remote processes can be coordinated in real time. This simultaneity of events represents a radical change in the way space and time is experienced. It is a product of the exclusiveness of spaces dissolving and being permeated or reshaped by sociomaterial networks, which at the same time both enhance and restrict the mobility of people, commodities, raw materials, data, information, signs, and signals. Virtual, communicative, and media-based mobility occur simultaneously in the same place, yet in dierent spaces, for:
The mobilizations we are describing here are by no means simply a natural or inevitable development. Rather, they are the outcome of a multitude of collective and individual decisions made in politics and everyday life. They are decisions aecting how mobility spaces and mobility structures develop and what is included in or excluded from the social and spatial organization of transportation and communication infrastructures.
