3 :: NEW TECHNOLOGIES,
NEW MOBILITIES
living away from home for extended periods. Such a focus on the ‘potential’ for
mobility (in this case, communicative and virtual) is sometimes referred to in the
literature of mobilities as ‘motility’.^19We may also trace in Sandra’s story, however, various disturbing pathologies of the self- again related to matters of containment – in her burgeoning preoccupation with these
technologies. This is evident especially from her immersion in electronic family photos
and videos – conducted on both Apple’s iMovie and Google’s Picasa. What was meant to
become a ‘family resource’ (in which members of the family could access this virtual
archive) has, in recent times, shaded over into something that Sandra worries is ‘too
obsessive’. Of course, many people spend large amounts of their leisure time
immersed in pursuits such as photography or video editing. In the case of Sandra,
however, something else appears to be at work here. She acknowledges that she feels
Figure 2.2
Departure hall, Seoul Incheon
International Airport, 2007(^19) See Vincent Kaufmann, Re-thinking
mobility: contemporary sociology
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).