Mobility, Media (tions) and Culture

Nowadays, in Europe and the world, we experience the continued effervescence of mobility, dislocation, travels and comings and goings. Through effective and bodily movements, or through virtual displacement, current societies are, in their structures, intrinsically constituted by the power of mobility, the possibility to leave, to go back and forth. Over the years we have seen the growth in the number of researches about the reasons why people leave a geographical space. We have also witnessed the increasing number of investigations about the reasons why people choose certain places to live, to work or to do tourism. The approaches on such an array of reasons and conditions are still valid. However, the current time appears to be marked by phenomena that are now much less linear than they were decades ago. The mobilities are not only increasingly multiform, but are also triggered by substantially different configuration purposes. Not to mention the very nature of politics and how it shapes and makes people inclined to mobility and migration (as it so happens in political and/or religious persecution circumstances). But we may alsorefer to social phenomena such as work, leisure, network transport, structure and modes of relationships and of family experience, the human trafficking networks, natural and/or human catastrophes, terrorism, wars and armed conflicts. These are presented today with features and dynamics inscribed in the experience of financial and informational globalisation, to which the place understood in the strict sense makes little difference. All those phenomena are marked by variability, flexibility, opacity, uncertainty and unpredictability. Sometimes they are even paradoxical. In addition to the nature of phenomena related to mobility and the possible typology of mobility and migration today, the fluidity, the contradiction, the fragility and uncertainty that mark contemporary political frameworks also deserve to be highlighted. These instances, observed from a macro-structural level, seem to have failed to have policy frameworks responding to the interests and ideals of human subjects, on one hand, and to be connected with the mobilised interests of the global financial economy, on the other hand. Other mobilities and migrations are planned and discovered: in cities under the ground, under water, or beyond Earth. In this sense, mobilities are one of the main objects of consumption, and also constitute a focus of prevention, estimation, monitoring and planning. In fact, mobilities can be viewed as a total social phenomenon, since they constitute an interlacement of events and processes that go beyond the act of movement in space and time, and include reception and integration processes, as well as discrimination, selection and hostility. Various processes of recollection and of (self and other) identity classification flow through the mobilities, collecting interpretations and evaluations carried out under specific ideological paradigms. Comunicação e Sociedade, vol. 28, 2015, pp. 15 – 22