John Urry’s call for a paradigm shift in sociology away from a consideration of social interaction at a standstill or stasis and towards a consideration of flux and the infrastructures of movement that enable social interaction to take place has been adopted extensively, if unevenly, in sociology. As Allen-Robertson and Beer point out, work on mobility either focuses on the physical mobility of things and people or on information. Thus, it largely ignores Urry’s initial call for the study of the movement of ideas (and, one could add, images) as well as humans and objects. Here I take up Urry’s original call for the study of mobile ideas and images and argue that such a move is helpful in analysing change in the public sphere.
History
School
Social Sciences
Department
Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
MEDIA CULTURE & SOCIETY
Volume
36
Issue
3
Pages
367 - 379 (13)
Citation
DOWNEY, J., 2014. Flux and the public sphere. Media Culture & Society, 36 (3), pp. 367-379.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publication date
2014
Notes
This item is closed access because the published version cannot be made available.