Communications and Mobility: The Migrant, the Mobile Phone, and the Container Box

If communication may be defined as the transportation of information and goods, populations on the move, then what might the Silk Route have to do with Bismarck’s 19th century dream to open up the Orient to Germany? Or with the EU’s latest communication initiative? Communication re–defines what it means to be in touch and make contact in refreshing—even startling—ways in a globalized world. The volume moves across time periods and geographies real and virtual, conjuring a potpourri of examples taken from a variety of disciplines and domains––offshore employment and investment, call centers, mobile phones, the “new mobilities” of commodities, people, and capital to container boxes, maritime trade routes, and shipping ports–of–call. Communication offers a capacious view of communicative patterns and flows that yield a rich understanding of this much bandied–about term. Generous in its sweep and energetic in its expository style, Communication offers an alternative history of communication in a global age by carefully drawing unimagined (or simply forgotten) connections between history and geography, temporality and spatiality, mobility and transport, the representational and material dimensions of media, and assemblages of "media" and transportation technologies.

David Morley is Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College. His previous publications include Media, Modernity and Technology (2007), Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity (2000), Spaces of Identity (1995), Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies (1992) and Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure (Routledge, 1986).