transcribed by Barry Silver
JD: Can you describe some of the mobilities you've been analyzing?
JU: One of the significant mobilities that I've been researching with colleagues are the sort of changing ways in which people's lives are networked, that they form social networks, and, of course, one can see that in relationship to work, but also in relationship to family and friendship. So, I think we might say that there's been a development of networked families, friendship networks, as well as work networks, which have been particularly examined by Manuel Castell's. So what we then did was to look at how people kept up - or developed and kept up - and then extended their social networks. And the problem for the earth is that these social networks are spatially stretched out, and so in order to see people, to see their best friends, their crucial members of their family, they have to, from time to time, meet up. And, although people use all sorts of means of communications, as well - and these are pretty important - a lot of those communications that they engage in are about the meetings that are going to take place, or, indeed, to reflect upon the meetings which they have had previously, and to chat, and to discuss, and exchange photographs and memories of those meetings. So, so far the research shows that meetings are very important, and, in some ways, they may be even more important for family and friendship than even in the world of work and business. And these meetings have a sort of obligatory character: many of them which take place on particularly key dates simply can't be missed. And often, around those meetings, are meals, viewing particular kinds of sports events, going to certain cultural and artistic events - and these have a sort of binding and obligatory character, which, so far - for these predominantly young people in this research - would not give up, and in fact have kind of got used to a life on the move where regular periodic meetings are a kind of core part of their very existence.
JD: Can you tell us more about network "capital"?
JU: So, one of the things that seems to be important in structuring people's lives and the emergent patterns of life is a capacity to form and extend networks, and that seems to require high levels of network capital. Network capital involves not - it involves partly the capacity to travel, to communicate, to - when you are traveling to find places to meet up, and also when things go wrong - the capacity to rectify the problems that are engendered - and, of course, all sorts of mobility systems involve intermittent failure and breakdown, so part of network capital is to be able to compensate and make up for system failure.
JD: Would you say that is part of its sociological value?
JU: Yeah. So, part of the significance for people's social life is that they can be - they are! - periodically on the move, and, from time to time - and they can deal with problems and difficulties if they have high levels of network capital. If they don't have high levels of network capital, they are relatively socially excluded from this, sort of, pattern of network mobile living that this research, at least, suggests is pretty important.
JD: Are these seemingly trivial meetings more important than we think?
JU: Yes, well, we were struck by how the events that these youngish people attend were felt by the people to be a matter of obligation. Sometimes they said it more in terms of a burden, that it was a burden, that they had to be at this collective encounter, and because across Europe there's this proliferation of cheap air flights - also pretty good rail system, as well as the access to car - there are multiple ways of getting to these events. And so you could - and so these young people could not use the excuse, "I can't get there" or "I can't get there at a reasonable price", because most of - at this time, at least - they could get there, but they often could get there by dint of organizing their time, money, and resources in clever and effective ways, in order to make sure that they would be at this event (or this set of events) by which their friendship relations, their family relations, were going to be sustained. And, therefore, I think this has significant implications for the future, and the capacity to live in a world in which cheap oil - and plentiful and cheap oil - will not be the case in the future. It's quite difficult to see these practices as being simply, or merely, discretionary. I don't think they are discretionary. They've sort of been built into these people's lives. And I should say that we looked at different kind of groups, social groups with - some were quite wealthy, and some with really modest kinds of levels of income - but for all of them, they were interconnected. And, as a consequence of those interconnections, they had this awesome burden to be there, to meet the friends, to meet the relatives, to - and often to extend their connections, because this is a sort of pattern of living in which meeting new people is very much part of that pattern of life, and so you - and, of course, you can only meet new people by being at those meetings.
JD: Rising oil prices thus far don't seem to have affected travel. Is there a threshold? How do you see this playing out?
JU: I think it's incredibly difficult to imagine what's going to happen on the basis - on the basis of this research, one would say that people will seek to continue the pattern of living, and the pattern of meeting and networks, that I've described, and that that's the case if there are only incremental increases in oil prices as reflected in the cost of fuel at the petrol pumps or at the tickets that are being bought - and, in fact, the deregulation of the airlines across Europe has produced this quite staggering increase in cheap air fares through the deployment of the low-cost flier as a new kind of business model, and the business model which, in a way, has pretty significant and severe implications for the global environment. So, I think the changes are likely to take quite a dramatic - either a very significant hike in prices, or, more significantly, I suppose - and it's sort of related - would be that simply this business model no longer works, which, clearly, a particular model that's been developed which presupposes access to cheap fuel, and if there were something that led a very significant reduction or collapse - as, of course, in the past various cheap, cheap, cheap airlines have routinely collapsed - but if suddenly a number of them were to collapse. Or, thirdly, they actually, simply, it wasn't so much the price change, but the availability changed. If there were simply - if there were no kerosene for the airlines, if there were no fuel regularly at the petrol pumps, then I think you would be in a situation where there was such a kind of uncertainties of the system that you would see very significant adjustments to this. Of course, and if that were to happen at the very same time as a kind of forms of Voice over Internet Protocol telephony was transformed, which provides much more - much kind of similar kinds of simulation of the sort of forms of communication that one can otherwise achieve face-to-face. If a set of things occurred together, then something quite different would probably happen, but in which people's social networks would still be central to their lives, and they would still be needing to meet - maybe much less frequently, or, maybe meeting a lot more virtually.
JD: How important is tourism in the world economy? How will tourism be affected?
JU: Well, by most calculations, the industry of travel and tourism is the largest single industry in the world, counting for about 10% of world income and employment across the world. So, this is a massively significant industry and set of activities, in which almost every country is affected by - either as recipient, and certainly as senders of visitors to other places. And there have been stunning increases in the rate of growth of international travel over the past 30-40 years, lots of expansion of domestic tourism, and a profound significance of tourism to the development and prosperity and viability of city after city. And one of the things that I think is interesting is the development within that - the fastest rate of growth of any category of current tourism is what's called VFR (Visiting Family and Relatives), essentially the sort of patterns of sociability - seeing friends, seeing relatives - particularly because of the growth of all sorts of international migration, and the forming of diasporic communities around the world. And, within that forming, there are many ways in which the members of those communities, from time to time, meet up, to go back to where they came from, or to invite the people that they - who were from where they came from - come to visit them. So, you have a sort of, a more socially based form of tourism developing, and that is actually going to be a big problem, because these entail meetings, travels, commitments, and obligations, which are not going to be simply given up by many people, for whom this is a pretty interesting and exciting thing to be able to do. I mean there are forms of tourism in which it's much harder to justify on many grounds. I'm always struck by the fact there are about 30 million visits a year to Las Vegas (almost all by air), and if one was thinking of a category of travel which one would wish to see fantastically reduced, I guess that would be top of my list.
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