ABSTRACT
Mobilities scholarship meanwhile emphasises the need to take movement seriously as a primary site of meaning and identity creation, and thus the focus of this chapter is on one form of mobility – that of bike messengering – and its relationship to street culture. However, although literatures on street culture emphasise the importance of studying locations, it has less to say about the ways in which the constituents of street culture are accrued, circulated and articulated through mobile practices. Ross outlines major intersectional components of street culture including: street capital; cultural influences; mass media; social media; and street crime. Scholarship on messengers also emphasises the role of technology and embodied practice in shaping street culture. In respect to the job of messengers in the gig economy, of particular relevance to their acquisition of street capital are the digital skills that they often use as reputation assets and which are harnessed for different purposes, both individualistic and associative.
