Mobility, Information and Social Networks

Seminar, 21 November 2003, 2.30-5pm in room G108.

Two presentations by John Urry and Robert Cooper and a debate.

John Urry
Sociology Department
Cartmel College
Lancaster University
Lancaster, LA1 4YL
UK

email: j.urry@lancaster.ac.uk

Robert Cooper
Centre for Social Theory and Technology (CSTT)
Keele University
UK

Email: mna13@keele.ac.uk

Robert Cooper (Professor of Social Theory & Organisation and Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Applied Economics, University of Limburg, Belgium).

Abstracts

Mobility and Social Networks, John Urry

There is a large and increasing scale of such travel. This increase has occurred simultaneously with the proliferation of communication and information devices that in some ways substitute for physical travel. I hypothesise that the bases of such travel are new ways in which social life is 'networked'. 

Such increasingly extensive networks, hugely extended through the informational revolution, depend for their functioning upon intermittent occasioned meetings. These moments of physical co-presence and face-to-face conversation, are crucial to patterns of social life that occur 'at-a-distance', whether for business, leisure, family life, politics, pleasure or friendship. So life is networked but it also involves specific co-present encounters within specific times and places. 'Meetingness', and thus different forms and modes of travel, are central to much social life, a life involving strange combinations of increasing distance and intermittent co-presence. The paper seeks to contribute to the emerging 'mobility turn' within the social sciences.

Mobile Information: what is information? What is mobility?, Robert Cooper

Definitions of information vary considerably. Its medieval meaning saw it as un-formation or lack of form or structure. In modern scientific information theory, information emphasises the construction and selection of certainty out of uncertainty, reliable knowledge out of ignorance. 

The seminar will present a reinterpretation of these definitions to re-present information as the continuous bridging of gaps and intervals in space and time. This compels us to see information and knowledge as a dynamic dialogue between form and un-form, and as a process of continuous deferral and active suspension which is forever incomplete. Transmission and mobility thus become dominant features of information processing as opposed to immediacy of meaning and reliability of content. Mobility itself is further elaborated as the creative expression of combinability and permutability. The implications of this interpretation for understanding information-communication technologies and globalisation will also be discussed.

This seminar is part of the ESRC funded ICTs in the Contemporary World: work management and culture series and is open to the public. UK PhD students are particularly encouraged to participate and their travels costs are subsidised. For more information about support for doctoral students, email e.s.keys@lse.ac.uk.

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