Mobility, New Social Intensities, and the Coordinates of Digital Networks

From stirrups to satellites, the invention of new forms of technical mobility has always created new intensities within the social. Each invention has also required a new idea of what it might be to be human, along with new tensions as older cultural practices and social forms are challenged. The contemporary mobility of digital networks is no exception. This issue of the Fibreculture Journal--edited by Andrew Murphie, Larissa Hjorth, Gillian Fuller and Sandra Buckley--is concerned with documenting, and beginning to think through, the new mobile intensities allowed by digital networks. "Intensity" here refers not just to the ubiquitous nature of mobile networks, or to the frequency of use of mobile communications. New intensities are like new forces erupting within the old - taking the social somewhere it has not perhaps been before. At the least, these intensities give established orders new energies to either resist or attempt to fold into established social practices and modes of thinking. [More....]