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7МИР В ДВИЖЕНИИ / ТЕЛЕМОСТ С ДЖОНОМ УРРИ World on the move / Telebridge with John Urry;
Higher school of economics (Moscow, Russia) -Lancaster university (Lancaster, UK), 10 September 2009
Джон Урри (род. 1946)
Выдающийся современный британский социолог, профессор Ланкастерского университета, руководитель Центра исследований мобильности. Им написаны работы в области социологии окружающей среды, социологии туризма, социологии мобильности и в области социальной теории в целом.
В ранних работах Урри внимание было сосредоточено на социальной теории и философии социальных наук. В соавторстве с Расселом Китом он подготовил труд «Социальная теория как наука» (1975, 1982), в котором изложены основные черты реалистической философии науки. В «Анатомии капиталистических обществ» (1981) представлены критические очерки к ряду марксистских традиций, структурализму Л. Аль-тюссера, немецкой теории государства и к последователям А. Грамши. В последнее время Джон Урри фокусирует свое внимание на изучении изменений в характере мобильности в современном обществе. Среди последних работ Дж. Урри: «Социология за пределами общества» (2000), «Мобильные технологии города» (соредактор с М. Шелером, 2006).
Participants
JU - John Urry, Lancaster University
NP - Nikita Pokrovsky, HSE
SB - Svetlana Bankovskaya, HSE
AB - Alex Boklin, HSE
Q - Questions from HSE MA students
JU: It sometimes seems as if all the world is on the move. The early retired, international students, terrorists, members of diasporas, holidaymakers, business people, slaves, sports stars, asylum seekers, refugees, backpackers,
commuters, young mobile professionals, prostitutes - these and many others -seem to find the contemporary world is their oyster or at least their destiny. Criss-crossing the globe are the routeways of these many groups intermittently encountering one another in transportation and communication hubs, searching out in real and electronic databases the next coach, message, plane, back of lorry, text, bus, lift, ferry, train, car, web site, wifi hot spot and so on. So we have sort of pattern of movement and various hubs where different groups in different sorts of ways - virtually or really - encounter each other.
The scale of this travelling is immense. It is predicted that by 2010 there will be at least one billion legal international arrivals each year (compared with 25 million in 1950); there are four million air passengers each day; at any one time 360,000 passengers are at any time in flight above the United States, equivalent to a substantial city; 31 million refugees roam the globe; and there were 552 m cars in 1998 with a projected 730 m in 2020, equivalent to one for every 8,6 people. In 1800 people in the United Slates travelled on average 50 metres a day - they now travel 50 kilometres a day. Today world citizens move 23 billion kilometres; by 2050 it is predicted that that figure will have increased fourfold to 106 billion.
Today world citizens move 23 billion kilometres; by 2050 it is predicted that that figure will have increased fourfold to 106 billion. But interestingly, people actually don't spend more time travelling, since this seems to have remained more or less constant at about one hour or so a day. Also, people do not necessarily make more journeys, they don't travel more time - but they travel faster and further, so what is crucial is the speed of travel. And of course what has happened has been the shift from walking, cycling or being on the back of a horse to sitting in the car, being on the train or in an airplane, the shift from slow modes to fast modes of travel.
The amount of travel industry accounts for about 10% of the world economy, about 10% of the world employment and about 10% of world income, and almost everywhere is to some degree affected by it. The World Tourism Organization, for example, publishes statistics for over 200 countries: most countries send and most countries receive some visitors. Perhaps North Korea has very few of them, but almost every other country of the world is a recipient of some visitors.
We have a pattern of voluntary or mostly voluntary travelling. It is the largest ever peaceful movement of people across borders. To some degree for people who are relatively affluent, maybe the rich - quarter or the third of the world population - the world has become a «department store of countrysides and cities» that can be at lest from time to time sampled. And it is also interesting: even with various global catastrophes like September 11 or the bombings in Madrid, Bali, Moscow and London, various global pandemics an so on this pattern of general increase in physical movement and in communications has not significantly gone down. If you look at the statistics after September 2001 of after these various bombings you got a little deep and then it reasserts itself.
The only exception to that has been after the financial collapse in various countries - it has been a significant worldwide deep after October 2008. Interesting question as well is whether that upward line will reassert itself or whether this is a significant shift eating mobility patterns around the world.
I should also point out that not only people are physically mobile but also materials are on the move, often carried by moving bodies and of course many products are made up of many different components that have been moved in and assembled in different sorts of ways. Physical movement takes place at the same with an astonishing growth of the Internet from 1993 and 1994 when the first Internet practices were brought in, and since the growth of mobile telephony as well. Internet, mobile telephony have reorganized communications between people and yet you have also had a large and significant increase in physical movements simultaneously.
It is now thought like 2 to 3 billion mobile phones in the world, with the population of 6,5 billion people and a billion to 2 billion internet users. So you have a worldwide mobilizing of mobile phones, Internet and also physical movements. Mobile technologies appear to be transforming many aspects of economic and social life that are in some sense on the «move» or away from «home». What we have are extensive, intricate connections between physical travel and modes of communication. Some people say that physical changes appear to be «de-materializing» connections, as people, machines, images, information, money and finance, ideas and dangers are «on the move», making and remaking connections at rapid speeds around the world. I think that issues of too much movement for some and too little for others, the wrong sort of movement or the wrong time are central to people's lives and central to the operations of many organizations, public institutions, private companies, NGOs and so on, they are centre-stage on many policy and academic agendas.
Q: What do you think about the recent development of mobile technology? Does it change the experience of movement? Does it actually destroy the experience of movement? Because irrelevant of where you are, you are constantly linked to your personal networks, you can even receive a call from your mother asking what you had for breakfast.
JU: Yes, sure. One of the things I would suggest is the way in which people are not quite away, intimately connected, and some people describe this as «imagined presence». As you move you are in your little mobile machine carrying around your connections and your relationships.
And of course address books. In a way, everybody's address book is different from others. So rather then in former times most people would have known roughly the same other people, what mobile life is a situation in which people know a lot of different people and each person's network is distinct, we have personalized networks. It is also interesting because although we don't know each other, but probably there are connections between our networks: there are people in my address book who know some other people, who would
then know Nikita, so there are interesting interconnections around the world through these networks.
* * *
JU: There are four main senses of the term «mobile» or «mobility». I use it a lot and write about the idea of mobile sociology. I think «mobile» has at least 4 meanings.
First, there is the use of mobile to mean something that moves or is capable of movement, as with the iconic mobile (portable) phone but also with the mobile person, home, hospital, kitchen, and so on. Mobile is a property of things and of people (as with the class designated the «new mobility»). Many technologies in the contemporary era appear to have set in motion new ways of people being temporarily mobile, including various physical prostheses that enable the «disabled immobile» to acquire some means of movement. Mostly the term mobile here is a positive category, except in the various critiques of what has been termed «hypermobility».
Second, there is the sense of mobile as a mob, a rabble or an unruly crowd. The mob is seen as disorderly precisely because it is mobile, not fully fixed within boundaries and therefore needs to be tracked and socially regulated. The contemporary world appears to be generating many new dangerous mobs or multitudes, including so-called smart mobs, which are less easily regulated and require for their governance, new and extensive physical and / or electronic systems of counting, regulation and fixing within known places or specified borders.
Third, there is the sense of mobility deployed in mainstream sociology / social science. This is upward or downward social mobility. Mobility is here vertical. It is presumed that there is relatively clear cut vertical hierarchy of positions and that individuals can be located by comparison with their parent's position or with their own starting position within such hierarchies. There is debate as to whether or not contemporary societies have increased the circulation of people up and down such hierarchies, making the modern world more or less mobile. Some argue that extra circulation only results from changes in the number of top positions and not in increased movement between them. There are complex relations between elements of physical movement and social mobility.
And finally, there is mobility in the longer term sense of migration or other kinds of semi-permanent geographical movement. This is a horizontal sense of being «on the move», and refers especially to moving country or continent often in search of a «better life» or to escape from drought, persecution, war, starvation and so on. Although it is thought that contemporary societies entail much mobility in this sense, previous cultures often presupposed considerable movement such as from Europe to the dominated countries of their various Empires or later to North America.
I am going to use «mobility» to cover all of these senses but we have to be careful to be precise about which we are using.
One of the things that happened in the last 20-30 years has been the growth of an enormous number of different kinds of social patterns that presume physical movement and communications at a distance.
First of all, there has been the growth of forced migration, asylum seeking, refugees, the homeless, travelling and migrating. And of course some of these are now said to be the product of the effects of the climate change (droughts, floods etc), of huge problems in securing sufficient food in various countries and continents. And indeed some are related to the growth of slavery: some people now say there are more slaves in the contemporary world than there were at the heights of the European slave trade in the late 18th century -the period of the European history that Europeans are often keen to forget. But there is a large amount of forced or more or less forced movement and often obviously in circumstances which are unbelievably exploitative and oppressive.
Second kind of travel is the huge amount of business and professional travel and the proliferation of all sorts of places - hotels, conference centers -which have sprung up to provide temporary homes for business and academic folks, architects and artists and so on to meet up, often explicitly in neutral territories. The scale of that is very extensive.
Thirdly, there has been the growth of international students and the travel by young people often developing what in New Zealand is called «overseas experience». I guess a lot of people at least in Europe would also have patterns of overseas experience, they believe that in order to discover yourself you have to have travelled - away from the place that you were brought up in. That is quite significant
Fourth category has been the growth of a large amount of medical travel. In fact medical travel was very important in the early development of leisurely travel because of the importance of spa-towns - places to take water. These days, in the contemporary world there are many different kinds of what people call «medical tourism». I think one of the interesting countries for medical tourism is Cuba. It has a good health service and now tries to attract large numbers of west-European visitors and Canadians.
Fifthly, there is a significance of what we might call military mobility of armies, tanks, helicopters, aircrafts, satellites and so on, some of which have important spin-offs into civilian usages: for example, airports often change from being military to then being civilian.
Then is a quite significant pattern of what I call «post-employment travel», that is people retiring to the same country or to sunnier places - a lot of people from Scandinavia often retire to Spain and other parts of the Mediterranean, so persons of retirement are forming transnational post-employment lifestyles.
Then also what I call «trailing travel», the trailing travel of children, partners, other relatives and domestic servants who have to follow around the primary breadwinner, that is a trailing pattern of dependence.
Then there is travelling migration within diasporas; the most interesting diaspora, I think, is the Chinese diaspora which some people think has at least 45 million people, pretty big society. The Chinese diaspora spread around the world and obviously all sorts of patterns of movement are increasing between that it and China itself.
There are many travelling service workers in somewhere like Dubai for example, so Dubai is both a place of huge numbers of temporary visitors and then huge numbers of temporary visitors who are workers including sex workers «servicing» the visitors.
There is tourist travel and within it a particularly important and the fastest growing category is visiting friends and relatives. That is partly because of the all of the things I said earlier about young people's travel or business and professional travel that sets up connections, networks and as a consequence of these networks from time to time friends and relatives get travelled too.
Then finally, there are all sorts of work-related travel and especially commuting travelling to other places daily or weekly.
A consequence of all these different patterns of social life is what I call «the mobility turn». Thinking about how mobilities should be built into social science, trying to mobilize analyses that have tended to be static, fixed and relatively non-spatial, non-mobile. This mobility turn is thus concerned with multiple ways in which economic and social life is performed and organized through time and across various kinds of space and especially the ways in which social relations get «stretched» across the globe. I try to think about the methods that follow and the phrase I have for this is «the developing mobile methods» so if people, ideas, information, money and objects are moving about how is it that social scientists try to capture and understand and analyze those movements? By definition, they are hard to capture, they are on the move, often they are not very visible and not very clear and some of the methods that social science has used are not very effective at capturing the slippery and changeable character of these patterns of movement.
In general, mobilities have been a black box, something people do not know about and do not investigate. Normally movement is seen as a neutral set of processes that permit the forms of economic, social and political life that need to be explained by other processes such as by economics or by politics. And to the extent which travel and communication have been studied, they have normally been placed in very separated categories so you have the study of transport, geography, the sociology of tourism or the study of communications. Of course holiday making, driving, walking phoning, flying and so on are manifestly significant within people's lives and yet they tend to be under-examined.
One of the things that I think is necessary to develop in relation to thinking about mobility is to take account of what I call «the mobility system».
These systems make possible movement, they mean that there are spaces for what I have been called «spaces of anticipation»that the journey can be made, that the message will get through, that the parcel will arrive, that the family group can meet up. These systems permit relatively predictable and relatively risk-free replication of the movement in question. And in the contemporary world there are an extraordinary number of these systems such as systems of tickets, addresses, safety, hubs, web-sites, money transfer, tours, storage of luggage, air traffic control, bar codes, timetables and there are many others of course. These systems are very interesting and are parts of the way in which the physical world has been overcome and made relatively secure regulated and relatively risk-free.
SB: Movement is always being and not-being in the present point; a question on movement ambiguity and movement unpredictability: does your notion of systems solve this problem?
JU: My view of systems is that they never finalize, never complete, and they are never a matter of equilibrium. Physicists have a term which I like -«metastable»: not stable and not anarchic, contingently stable. Systems are held in a state in which quite minor things - bearing in mind the idea of complexity -can in certain circumstances disrupt what appears to be a highly stabilized system or a set of systems. Also, of course, systems are very interdependent with each other, so again - a small change somewhere in one system can then have a
knock-on effect, reverberations which then impact on other systems.
* * *
JU: I see the capacity to network as a form of capital like economic capital or cultural capital. Network capital, I want to argue, is increasingly important in the contemporary world and it is probably more unequally distributed as other forms of capital.
Movement of some creates new industries, new things like airports, service stations, hotels, leisure centers because for others they are employees. But for me, an utterly central part of the mobilities' program of research is to think about the new ways in which movement for some is non-movement for others.
A very interesting example is the big cities that now are come to develop around airports. Airports are epitome of movement aspects - people are moving in and out all the time. But of course there are large numbers of people who are relatively immobilized living and working in cities which often employ 50 or 100 thousand people. Sometimes they are mobile, but mobile to work for others -like my example with Dubai where the 80% of workforce are made up from migrant workers from Pakistan and India - incredible flows coming in to service. And when the workers arrive in Dubai their passports are taken away from them and they only get them back when leaving.
Yes, I completely agree and my method of looking at that is the concept of network capital. Also, I think there is an ideology of movement, the notion that to be a successful professional person you should have travelled about and
you should have accumulated network capital from movement - I guess that is
something that all of us are complicit in to some degree.
* * *
The significance of ideas of movement and circulation in the early scientific thinking, especially followed Harvey's discovery of how blood circulates within the human body and Galileo's notion that a natural state is to be in motion and not at rest, was the very idea that motion is «natural» and is something that ought to be identified, registered, promoted and so on. Some of the ideas that circulation is good you can see in a lot of early discussions on what should be done about cities in the early 20th century with the development of the motorcar with the car being something that would promote good healthy circulation in the body of society or the body of the city. So I think in Western thought the virtues of movement are very significant. There is in the modern world an accumulation of movement that is analogous to the accumulation of capital -repetitive movement or circulation made possible by diverse, interdependent mobility-systems.
Some pre-industrial mobility-systems included walking, horse-riding, sedan chairs, coach travel, inland waterways, sea shipping and so on. But many of the mobility-systems which are now significant date from England and France in the 1840s and 1850s. Their interdependent development defines the contours of the modern mobilized world that brings about an awesome «mastery» of the physical world (generally known as the «industrial revolution»). Nature gets dramatically and systematically «mobilized» in mid nineteenth-century Europe. Systems dating from that exceptional moment include a national post system in
1840 (Rowland Hill's Penny Post in Britain based upon the simple invention of the prepaid stamp), the first commercial electrical telegram in 1839 (constructed by Sir Charles Wheatstone and Sir William Fothergill Cooke for use on the Great Western Railway), the invention of photography and its use within guide books and advertising more generally (Daguerre in France in 1839, Fox Talbot in England in 1840), the first Baedeker guide (about the Rhine), the first railway age and the first ever national railway timetable in 1839 (Bradshaws), the first city built for the tourist gaze (Paris), the first inclusive or «package» tour in
1841 (organized by Thomas Cook between Leicester and Loughborough in Britain), the first scheduled ocean steamship service (Cunard), the first railway hotel (York), the early department stores (first in Paris in 1843), the first system for the separate circulation of water and sewage (Chadwick in Britain) and so on. In 1854 Thomas Cook declared as the slogan for such a period: «To remain stationary in these times of change, when all the world is on the move, would be a crime. Hurrah for the Trip - the cheap, cheap Trip».
But of course it turned out to be very limited changes - the twentieth century then saw a huge array of other «mobility-systems» develop, including the car-system, national telephone system, air power, high speed trains, modern urban systems, budget air travel, mobile phones, networked computers. As we
move into the twenty first century these «mobility systems» are developing further novel characteristics.
First, systems are getting even more complicated, made up of many elements and based upon an array of specialized and arcane forms of expertise. Mobilities have always involved expert systems but these are now highly specific, many are based upon entire university degree programmes and there is the development of highly specialized companies. Second, such systems are much more interdependent with each other so that individual journeys or pieces of communication depend upon multiple systems, all needing to function and interface effectively with each other. Third, since the 1970s onwards, systems are much more dependent upon computers and software. There has been a large-scale generation of specific software systems that need to speak to each other in order that particular mobilities take place. Fourth, these systems have become especially vulnerable to what Charles Perrow «normal accidents», accidents that are almost certain to occur from time to time, given the tightly locked-in and mobile nature of many such interdependent systems: if one bit goes wrong, the whole system goes wrong.
What has been generated is what I like to call «mobility complex» which is a new system of economy, society and resources. That have spread around the world and this mobility complex is remaking consumption, pleasure, work, friendship and family life.
One of the most interesting writers about that is Zygmunt Bauman. He says, as a consequence of this complex «mobility climbs to the rank of the uppermost among the coveted values - and the freedom to move, perpetually a scarce and unequally distributed commodity, fast becomes the main stratifying factor of our late-modern or postmodern times». Mobility inequalities become central to understanding contemporary societies. And of course as people move about gaining new addresses in their address books so that network extends, they then become more networked and networking thus is a form of inequality.
As I said earlier, movement and especially the capacity to move through what I call network capital have become particularly significant. Network capital may consist of the number of features: the ability to access forms of movement (the capacity to repair a journey when something goes wrong with it and then other alternative could replace it), to know about these forms of movement through, for example, timetables, access to information and communication systems.
My argument is that the contemporary social science ought to take very much into the hand these inequalities of network capital and network capital is obviously connected to income and wealth, it is, as Bauman says, a main stratifying factor in contemporary times and we should study network capital alongside economic capital and cultural capital.
Q: Is network capital measurable or is it just a metaphor?
JU: Yes, it is certainly not as easily measurable as you could measure the economic capital or the distribution of income or wealth but of course normally
we would think that, for example, relationships of social class involves more than just a distribution of income and wealth but these are sets of relations, so network capital would also be a set of relations and it would involve therefore indicators - say, the number of different forms of transport that any individual has access to, forms of communications, the reliability and consistency of those, the degree to which in a given society those were consistent and integrated with each other, the degree to which it was possible for particular groups to repair situations where there might be a some kind of a breakdown. So I think what we could do is to study it at a specific level - particular social groups, to establish how and why these groups have high or low network capital. It would be difficult to produce a national distribution but then that would be true for other forms of basis of stratification as well.
I am writing a book with Anthony Elliott called «Mobile lives» and he is been doing a research on what we call «the globals» - those who are hugely rich and with high levels of network capital and we have to some degree being exploring through his research how to study the network capital of what we might loosely call «the super rich» whose lives are formed through movement. There is no problem in moving from one country to another because «the super rich» would have homes in those countries as opposed to merely having to book a hotel room or sleeping on somebody's couch. And of course also there are some groups who compensate for relatively low network capital such as youngish people who in a way often travel in ways more than they «ought to», given their income - for example couchsurfing networks is an interesting way of getting around or compensating for limitations on network capital. So there lots of ways in which one can begin to study at least for specific groups the huge inequalities. I'm not sure whether these inequalities are more pronounced than distribution of income and wealth but they are certainly very pronounced and also they are obviously very significant by ethnicity, by gender, in complicated ways by age and so on.
* * *
AB: I would like to know your opinion of what might be called «demate-rialization of human experience» or «decrease of vitality». For example, instead of making a real journey I can sit in front of a TV or a computer and watch pictures, videos or take a virtual tour on the Internet. What do you think about the perspectives of this phenomenon?
JU: The contemporary world is extremely difficult to research because the conditions of physical travel and communications are so rapidly changing, and figuring out how that is going to develop in the future is a huge question.
I think there is still a very strong notion of material connections, at least from time to time. This event wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't met couple of colleagues and organized this previously somehow. There has been an establishment and a certain sort of trust between us because we physically met -it is a material basis. And then, on this basis, we have other kinds of communi-
cations, such as we are having now, or through mobile telephony, e-mails or Skype. So at the moment is seems to me that the virtual is adding into material.
What is really interesting is whether people would substitute for the physical or body relationships or encounters with purely virtual. I don't think there is much evidence that this happens so far, but we don't know in what ways technologies will change - this might be a much more dematerialized possibility. What would the Internet be like in a, say, 20-years time? How would we be doing this encounter 20 years from now? I guess it would be pretty different and maybe each of you and I would be 3D-figures, many of the features of the faces would be experienced by the virtual communication systems and we might well say: «Ok, that's the more real experience we said of the physical travel».
NP: I believe that in the prospective of a few years from now or few decades perhaps, we will have less need for physical travel and there is a lot of evidence how physical travel in the world is replaced with virtual (not to mention what we are having now). Take virtual tourism for example: now we are installing web-cams in different geographical spots of the world in order to give people the illusion of being present somewhere where they can go physically! But they don't have time or desire enough - just to see the picture of what is happening there online.
In my view, non-material, dematerialized factors will take the leading and prevailing role - in one way or another, and the segment of dematerialized world would increase substantially. Virtual mobilities will replace the lack of physical motion; it will even bring some changes in human bodies - we will look differently from what we are now.
SB: What will happen if the virtual communication replaces physical movement on which all the tourist industry stands upon? Or why people are willing to be there physically, by their own bodies?
NP: This is debatable - some people do, some people don't. I don't think that everybody is just dying to travel - this is sometimes forced by the circumstances, by mass media, by public opinion, but sometimes to stay where you are is a bit more rewarding than to go somewhere.
JU: The physical movement that we have known, al least in a part of the world, over the last century or so, have all been premised upon cheap oil. The politics of oil and the fact that at the moment there is no real substitute for oil for moving water, people and objects around the world - this is all a big issue. And, of course carbon emissions from that oil and the effects on climate change are incredibly significant and that would add to the complexities of your point that life would be increasingly «living a life on the screen» as opposed to «living a life on the road».
