The Place of Mobility: Technology, Connectivity, and Individualization

The mobile is that which moves; mobility is the capacity to move. Movement can be a movement in place or a movement between places, but without place there can be no mobility. Communication is itself a form of movement - a communing between places - and so carries an essential mobility within it, as well as an essential relation to place. When we talk, in contemporary terms, of "mobile communication," however, we do not refer to the intrinsic movement that all communication exhibits, bur rather to an enhanced capacity to communicate across changes of place. That this is indeed an enhanced capacity is a reflection of the fact that what has changed with the advent of modern mobility in communication is not a change in the mere possibility for communication across changes of place (there have always been some ways, if often rudimentary and limited, to maintain communication even while on the move), but in the ways in which this possibility can be realized. So great is this change, however, that one might nevertheless say that the change is a qualitative, rather than merely quantitative, one, and that it constitutes a watershed in the history of communication, marking off the mobile communications of the present, and of the future, from anything that has gone before.