ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the issue of potential mobilities, by first presenting some possible basic terminology for potential mobilities, followed by a critical review of motility as potential mobility. The study of mobilities has flourished during the last two decades, and by the very nature of mobility as a human action, much attention has been given to the various mobility activities and options as well as to their social and spatial significances. The most well known term, motility, was taken from biology, referring originally to the very ability of animals to move, but used mainly for single-celled and simple multi-cellular organisms, as compared to animals' locomotion. Potential mobilities could have been considered as a major dimension of a wider notion of human action potential, or action capacity. Increased mobilities via transportation, and even more so through communications and information technologies, result in distanciation, or the 'stretching' of social systems in time and space.
