Between the Physical and the Virtual: Connected Mobilities?

Abstract

The city is increasingly seen in terms of flow and flux. The mobilities of people, cyborgs (Haraway 1991, 1995, 1997; Featherstone 2000), things and information extend within and beyond the usual limits of the city. Furthermore, space has become reorganized, (re)combined and permeated by technologies of extended virtual connectivity through telecommunications and ICT development. In this chapter, it is our intention to explore the development of these mobile and emergent technospaces through two specific sites within the city of Liverpool, UK. Using the empirical case-studies of an Internet website and the city’s regional airport, we attempt to illustrate the connectivity of the mobilities that intersect these spaces. The chapter examines how these mobilities have become increasingly entangled in both virtual and physical worlds. We can term these cybermobilities: motions that transgress their (im)material domains, transmaterial movements engaged by cyborg bodies linked to complex and wide-ranging physical and virtual networks.2