3 :: NEW TECHNOLOGIES,
NEW MOBILITIES
for a range of both professional and personal activities.^14 Indeed, communications
scheduling ‘on the move’ comprises a substantial amount of the individual’s travel
patterns in conditions of advanced mobilities. In contrast to the immobile, fixed desk
of previous work environments, today’s digitized, mobile work stations, made up of
palmtops, laptops, PDAs, WiFi and 3G phones, mean that portable offices are
increasingly commonplace throughout cars, planes and rail carriages and places of
waiting en route. It is true, of course, that work and related professional activities
have been undertaken by people throughout time and across a wide spectrum of
traditional travel forms – from strategic military thinking on ships to routine
paperwork done on trains. But contemporary communications scheduling performed
in relation to travel times and travel planning is different in scope to previous types of
travel communication, because of the instantaneity of new communications
technologies and the global reach of digital networks. This is significant because we
may also speak of reflexivity at the heart of communications-based travel planning,
in relation to both the calendars of work and professional activities that individuals
intend to undertake while ‘on the move’, and also in terms of alterations to schedules
that arise from either not being able to ‘get hold’ of key contacts or learning of new
information that demands a revision to one’s work schedule. That such strategic
travel planning and communications scheduling ‘on the move’ is commonplace
depends on a vast array of technological infra structures – for example, the ‘screens’
located in business class areas of planes and rail carriages or the provision of
computing facilities throughout airports and railway stations.In such travel situations, it is not only the substantive time of the journey itself that
can be ‘filled’ with productive work or meaningful life pursuits. It is also the ‘edges’
of travel time – waiting in an airport terminal lounge, sitting on a delayed train – that
become potentially usable in this way. It is characteristic of contemporary attitudes
to work and related professional activities that people seek to undertake various
productive activities – mobile telephony, SMS texting, email – while experiencing
unanticipated temporal delays when travelling. Only when ready-to-hand
miniaturized mobilities are more or less easily available, however, can we speak of
networked communication and information as productive possibilities for people in
this context. These delayed edges of travel time have been captured nicely by Lyons et
al., who describe the importance of ‘equipped waiting’.^15 Equipped waiting, situated
on the delayed edges of travel time, allows for an inhabiting of, or dwelling within,
information communications networks, from which individuals can conduct business,
work, romance and family negotiations.(^14) Glenn Lyons and John Urry, ‘Travel time
use in the information age’, Transport
Research A, 2005, 39: 257–76.
(^15) Glenn Lyons, Juliet Jain, David Holley,
‘The use of travel time by rail passengers
in Great Britain’, Transportation Research
Part A: Policy and Practice, 2007, 41(1):
107–20.