Digital Media and Interspaces

Reflecting Upon the article Travelling Times by John Urry (2006)

Interspaces are new forms of personal and social space that are spaced between home, work, and social life, which are a product of new social routines, as noted by Urry (2006) in his article, Travelling Times. This is essentially the time spent in the commute whether by walking, rail travel, or car travel. These interspaces were never referred to until the mobility paradigm became prevalent within the masses, an idea of getting something done during the commute time is central to the formation of these interspaces. This productivity during the commute made possible by the appropriate tools and technologies. The interspaces enable the commuters to make their time productive, whether through everyday socialization, studying, or work related content. Digital Media has dominantly contributed to the formation of these interspaces, by providing commuters with ‘ready-to-hand’ tools of productivity, such as mobile phones, tablets, laptops, netbooks, mobile internet sticks and Kindles.  The mobile culture has allowed for constructive time on the move enabling communication and activities.

In the Travelling Times, Urry (2006) specifies two significant forms of mobile interspaces: public spaces of railway carriages and privatized spaces of a car. As a matter of fact, the use of railway carriages as a means of transport may take substantial time in commute than privatized means of transport, but there are more devices to make the time productive on the railway since it excludes the legalities of  the attentive driving factor. Recently, with the emergence of contemporary devices to support mobile Internets such as tablets, Kindles, netbooks and smartphones, tasks such as documentation, reading, and organizing can be efficiently carried out in the sphere of railway interspaces. With regards to the domain of car, which Urry (2006) describes as another paramount of mobility system, an iron cage of modernity, which involves various activities, some legal, some illegal, to make the use of interspace through digital media.

Instead of a travel time void, the digital media technologies have made the formation of interspaces feasible with ‘ready-to-hand’ technologies of organization and communication to increasingly support a life on the move. Hence, the mobility enabled by the digital media tools prevails for both rail and car travellers as it involves arranging and rearranging events on the move. “Activities and travel flow into one another” (p. 368), which is crucial in understanding the correlation between interspaces and multitasking. The digital media devices enable the boundaries of travel time and activity time to blur. These mobile technologies populate the everyday interspaces to reorganize the day by making phone calls for commuting, gossipping, scheduling-rescheduling meetings, downloading information, meeting up, moving on, building networks, planning the next meeting and coordinating a complex choreography in time-space. “Travel time is converted into activity time” (p. 369), which is vital in understanding that the digital media tools seem to provide food for the appetite of productivity during transit time.

Reference:

Urry, J. (2006). Travelling Times. European Journal of Communication, 21(3), 357-372.