Mobilities and new technologies
Mobilities systems in the Mediterranean have historically been sensitive to economic, cultural and technological innovations. At the turn of the 21st century one such innovation whose significance we are only beginning to understand is the taking place in the field of information and communication technologies (ICTs).
In the realm of tourism, ICTs are enabling new forms of connectivity while being on the move thus reconfiguring basic dualisms upon which tourism is premised such as here/there, home/away, familiar/exotic. Communication and transportation technologies are also facilitating transnational lifestyles such as those of the early retired acquiring second homes ‘under the sun’, and turning formerly exotic tourist places and landscapes into extensions of metropolitan everyday spaces of economic elites. The convergence of informational and tourist spaces is assisting and expanding the tourist imagination (e.g. guided tours at heritage sites in iPods, webcams becoming a pervasive element of hotels, beaches, public squares, promenades), enabling new kinds of atmospheres of place and landscapes and more sophisticated modes of surveillance, especially in and around luxury enclavic resorts where economic elites increasingly segregate themselves from locals and other tourists leading to what is a de facto civic stratification based on access to communication and transportation infrastructures.
As landscapes of leisure expand througout the region so too criminal networks that use tourist places, technologies and infrastructures to glide discreetly along the coast aided by state-of-the-art transportation, communications and surveillance technology in their drugs and arms trafficking opperations to bypass police and customs patrols. In the face of growing anxieties in European societies about migration and terrorism, especially after 9/11, border control in the Mediterranean is increasingly being militarised with the deployment of military-style hardware including warships and aircraft and state-of-the-art military-style surveillance technology such as the SIVE (Integrated System of Surveillance of the Strait of Gibraltar, the world’s most sophisticated coast control system to date consisting of fixed and mobile radars, thermal cameras, infrared sensors, boats, helicopters and aeroplanes). The technological race unleashed between criminal gangs and police corps is being reflected in ever more complex strategies to reach European coasts and the diversion of migration flows towards longer and more dangerous routes. With EU and NATO police and military forces now regularly patrolling Western Africa coasts down south to Senegal, migration flows are effectivly re-scaling national and EU borders and ICTs are playing an increasingly central role in the new border control and surveillance policies.
It is not only along national borders where the geopolitical struggles of resource exploitation, cultural change, population displacements, ethnic conflict, ecological change, and liberalization are being expressed. As Stephen Graham argues, cities too are gainning prominence as sites of conflict: ‘War, terrorism and cities are redefining each other in complex but poorly explored ways. Such redefinitions are, in turn, bound up with deeper shifts in the ways in which time, space, technology, mobility, and power are constructed and experienced in our societies as a whole.'
These developments show how ICTs emable not only the splintering and
growing magnitude of flows but also a re-scaling of political, military,
economic, imaginary borders and new regimes of governance. Aditionally,
while these technologies are central to tackling international crime and
terrorism, they also pose serious doubts about their potential role in
threatening individual liberties and evidence suggest they are progressively
becoming part of the tourist landscapes without public resistance.
| Home | Mission
Statement | About Us | Networks
| Seminar Series | Events
|
| News |
Critical Mobilities | Contacts |
