ABSTRACT
John Urry (JU): In 1990 when I first published the Tourist Gaze it was much less clear just how significant the processes we now can ‘globalisation’ were to become. Indeed the ‘internet’ had only just been invented and there was no indication how it would transform countless aspects of social life, being taken up more rapidly than any other previous technology. And no sooner than the internet had begun to impact, than another ‘mobile technology’, the mobile phone, transformed communications practices ‘on the move’. Overall the 1990s have seen remarkable ‘time space compression’ as people across the globe have been brought closer through various technologically assisted developments… And part of this sense of compression has stemmed from the rapid flows of travellers and tourists physically moving from place to place [and] there is no evidence that virtual and imaginative travel is replacing corporeal travel, but there are complex intersections between these different modes of travel that are increasingly de-differentiated from one another…Of course not all members of the world community are equal participants…[in emerging] countless mobilities, physical, imaginative and virtual, voluntary and coerced (Urry 2001: 1-2, 8).
