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Altered states: An essay on

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a b c
Eduardo de la Fuent e , John Budarick & Michael Walsh
a
Sociology, Flinders Universit y, Flinders, Adelaide, Aust ralia
b
English, Communicat ions and Performance St udies, Monash
Universit y, Melbourne, Aust ralia
c
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 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
Vol. 26, No. 1, February 2012, 39–49

Altered states: An essay on communication and movement

Eduardo de la Fuente*a, John Budarickb and Michael Walshc
a
Sociology, Flinders University, Flinders, Adelaide, Australia; bEnglish, Communications and
Performance Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia; cAustralian Bureau of Statistics,
Canberra, Australia.

The concept of mobility seems to be sweeping across the humanities and social
sciences. We argue that the close relationship between communication and movement
is to some extent independent of specific communication technologies. We
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demonstrate this through the particular ‘knottings’ of music and physical/imaginative

movement. We also suggest that in order to do justice to the complex entanglements of
communication and movement, it would pay to re-examine social theories from an age
when communication and transportation were not yet fully differentiated. The latter
promises to reveal that communication is connection and interchanges/exchanges that
impact the senses.

A recent collection, entitled Communication as . . . , puts forward as many as 27 different

understandings of the term ‘communication’ (Shepherd, St John, and Striphas 2006). The
list includes everything from ‘relationality’ and ‘ritual’ to ‘story-telling’ and ‘rational
argumentation’. Strangely absent from this list is the notion of communication as
‘movement’, ‘motion’, ‘action’ or ‘kinesics’. Only one of the contributions gestures towards
recognizing the importance of movement. Jonathan Sterne’s entry on ‘Communication as
Techné’ quotes Lewis Mumford’s declaration that there is a ‘vital connection between all
physical movement and speech’ (cited in Sterne 2006a, 96). As we will explain later, as a
leading theorist of sound technologies, Sterne (2003) has good reason to emphasize the link
between communication and movement.
Our contention in this article is that the ‘vital connection’ between physical movement
and communication – as Mumford puts it – transcends individual communication
technologies and also enlarges what we understand by communication. Our experiences of
the world are shaped by the impressions that sight, sound, smell, touch and kinetic
processes make upon the senses (Waite 2003). In this respect, to cite again from Sterne
(2006b, 117, 118), communication ‘is not only symbolic action’; it can also be profitably
‘conceptualized as organized movement and action’.
For Sterne, the connection between communication and movement is historical and
cultural – he notes, for example, the nineteenth-century tendency to refer to trains as ‘steam
communication’. However, the relationship between communication and movement might
be said to be ‘phenomenological’ as well as historical and cultural; imaginative as well as
physiological and material. As Waite (2003, 23) proposes, communication is not simply
about the ‘eye or the ear but that complex human sensorium of speech, vision, hearing,

*Corresponding author. Email: eduardo.delafuente@flinders.edu.au

ISSN 1030-4312 print/ISSN 1469-3666 online

q 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2012.630140
http://www.tandfonline.com
 40 E. de la Fuente et al.

gesture, touch, and kinesthetic processes’. We might further suggest that even silence is a
product of physical movement to the extent that we associate quietude with ‘being still’
or ‘slowing down’. As the cultural historian Peter Burke (1993) proposes, silence is an ‘art’
form – one with its own history, codes and modes of embodiment.

Movement and communication technologies

Understandably, the recent spate of new ‘mobile communication technologies’ has
reignited interest in the issue of movement amongst communication scholars. The field of
mobile phone studies is a good case in point (see Katz and Aakhus 2002). These studies
have tended to emphasize characteristics of ‘mobile media’ such as the ‘deterritorializa-
tion’ of space, the increased significance of information and communication ‘flows’ and
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the ‘speed’ of current life. Castells (1996) has termed the kind of social formation
emerging, the ‘network society’.
But, in many respects, a heightened perception of how communication and movement
relate to each other predates the advent of mobile media. The differences between ‘screen’
and ‘print’ communication technologies already underlined the notion that motion and
sense impressions were interrelated. As with the precepts of ‘medium theory’ more
generally, the emphasis in discussions of cinema and television was often about how such
technologies altered perceptions of time and space, causality and what it meant to ‘feel
connected’. Thus, Waite suggests:
Motion distinguishes the space of the screen from the book. With the book, time and space are
fixed on the smooth page . . . With the screen images move, whether those images be words,
landscape, or human forms; nothing is static. (Waite 2003, 86 – 7)
With his usual penchant for hyperbole, the Canadian media theorist McLuhan (1957,
493) declared that in rolling up the ‘external world on a spool’, the movie camera became
a ‘kind of magic carpet which conveys the enchanted spectator anywhere in the world’.
As with many of McLuhan’s hyperbolic statements, there is a fundamental point being
made. The reason the movie camera and projector are able to function as a kind of magic
carpet is because of ‘their resemblance to the process of human cognition’ (McLuhan
1957, 493).
In the case of cinema, the constitutive role of movement could be said to be both
obvious and profound. The cinema involves a moving reel that ‘flickers’ on the screen.
The techniques of film-making include narrative, ‘close-up’, ‘reverse shot’, and the
medium thrives on ‘flashbacks’ and ‘flash-forwards’. It plays with our sense of time and
space. In cinema we not only have moving bodies and objects on screen, but a new
sensation of space as the ‘eye identifies itself with the lens of the camera, which
permanently shifts in distance and direction’ (Panofsky cited in Waite 2003, 88).
Historians and theorists of screen media have also detected certain parallels between the
mechanization of movement via technologies such as the train and car, and the kind of
experience provided by screen technologies. Interestingly, the first ‘motion picture, by
Lumière, featured a train arriving at a station, and early audiences reacted with horror to
the moving image of the train coming towards them, out of the screen’ (Jervis 1998, 205).
Connections have also been made between automobile travel and screen viewing, the
similarities extending to watching the world ‘float by’ (Baudrillard 1989). The gaze of the
car driver is also directed outwards in the same way that a cinema or television viewer is
attentive to the world on the screen rather than those objects or person in their immediate
environment (Morse 1998).
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 41

Movement even without motion

Medium theory’s emphasis on motion and its effects on the senses might lead us to think
that movement is technology specific. However, one of McLuhan’s most tantalizing
suggestions is precisely that the movie camera is a powerful medium because it duplicates
aspects of human cognition and perception. Thus, McLuhan (1957, 493) explains, in
cognition we ‘recreate in the medium of our senses and inner faculties the drama of
existence’. The poetic process is therefore nothing more than the ‘power to arrest’ by
reversing, fast-forwarding, slowing down, or temporarily suspending, ‘stages of human
apprehension’ (McLuhan 1957, 493). McLuhan (1957, 493) adds, not for nothing, is
Aristotle’s theory of cognition based around the concept of the ‘plot’ and narrative is seen
as fundamentally about propulsion or movement from one state to another.
But if cognition itself involves the sensory experience of the twists and turns of the
‘drama’ of human existence then McLuhan’s comments on cinema are not – as our
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stereotypes of ‘medium theory’ often suggest – technology specific. The embedding of

movement within cognition itself also suggests communication theory going beyond the
study of ‘kinesics’ and body-motion (Birdwhistell 1970; Hall 1966). It highlights that
movement is happening all the time in our minds and in our bodies. Seen from this
perspective, even a sedentary communication technology like the book entails movement.
Books are portable and the act of reading involves the movement of the eyes across the page.
Reading also has its own pace and rhythm; and, books take us on imaginative ‘journeys’.
Similarly, music is a medium that possesses all of the essential qualities of movement.
By definition, music is a temporal medium, the ‘temporal succession of articulated sound’
(Adorno 1993, 401). In music, there are ‘movements’ (as in sections of symphonies and
sonatas); there is ‘beat’ or ‘pulse’, as well as ‘meter’; and the temporal organization of
sound is as important to music’s communication properties as ‘pitch’, ‘timbre’, ‘melody’
and ‘harmony’. We use music to march, dance and coordinate various physical movements;
and music is often described as something that ‘moves’ us emotionally.
In short, movement can be understood as an aspect of any number of media. As
Williams (1961, 24) suggests, in relationship to rhythm, movement provides a way for
‘experience to be re-created for the person’; ‘not merely as an abstraction nor an emotion
but a physical effect on the organism’.
At the most prosaic level, therefore, communication could be said to involve the
perception of an altered state: someone makes a gesture and other registers it; an individual
flicks a switch and the television is on; another enters a shopping mall and encounters the
visual and acoustic signs associated with retail spaces. In each of these cases, without
movement there would be no communication.

The ‘mobilities paradigm’

In his influential Mobilities, Urry (2007, 18) defines the ‘mobilities paradigm’ as a post-
disciplinary matrix of ‘theories, methods, questions and solutions’ concerned with the
‘project of establishing a movement-driven social science’. He claims that mobility has
been something of a ‘black box’ for the social sciences, which have far too often been
concerned with static metaphors, theories and methods. But with an increasing number of
people, objects, technologies, and messages now on ‘the move’, Urry (2007, 6) detects ‘a
“mobility” structure of feeling in the air’.
Urry’s manifesto for a ‘movement-driven social science’ offers many reasons for why
communication and movement need to be thought of together. Firstly, communication is
directly implicated in several of key types of ‘mobilities’. Urry lists the following types:
 42 E. de la Fuente et al.

(1) corporeal travel (i.e., the actual physical movement of people in activities as different
as ‘daily commuting’ and migration or exile); (2) movement of objects (i.e., the sending
and receiving of goods to various markets, as well as gifts and souvenirs); (3) imaginative
travel (i.e., being transported elsewhere through images and narratives in print, acoustic
and visual media); (4) virtual travel (i.e., the ‘real time’ transcending of geographical
distance through things such as video-conferencing, telecommuting, on-line business and
social networking); and (5) communicative travel (i.e., person-to-person contact through
letters, telephone, fax and mobile) (Urry 2007, 47). We can see from this list that
communication and mobility often go hand-in-hand (see also Urry 2007, 157 –82). Urry
(2007, 158) also points to the fact that ‘many communications are actually about travel,
arrangements and schedules’ and that ‘communications and travel are partially substitutes
for each other’. Indeed, as he notes in a separate article, entitled ‘Mobility and Proximity’,
given the proliferation of multiple communications technologies and practices why do
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people still physically travel at all (Urry 2002) ?

We find one of Urry’s most suggestive comments regarding the ‘knotting’ of mobility
and communication in his discussion of the kinds of pleasures that travel affords:
[T]he time spent traveling is not necessarily unproductive and wasted time or dead time that
people always wish to minimize. Movement often involves an embodied experience of the
material and sociable modes of dwelling-in-motion, places of and for activities in their own
right, to climb a mountain, to do a good walk, to take a nice train journey. There are activities
conducted at the destination; activities conducted while traveling including the ‘anti-activity’
of relaxing, thinking, shifting gears; and the pleasures of traveling itself, including the
sensation of speed, of movement through and exposure to the environment, the beauty of a
route and so on. (Urry 2007, 11)
The notion of ‘dwelling-in-motion’, referred to by Urry, requires some unpacking. It is
interesting that Urry’s Mobilities includes a chapter on ‘Place’ and also has an extended
discussion of Heidegger’s notion of ‘dwelling’. Heidegger (cited in Urry 2007, 31)
famously declared: ‘[t]o say that mortals are is to say that in dwelling they persist through
spaces’. The mode of dwelling establishes relationships between the ‘inside’ and the
‘outside’, the ‘near’ and the ‘far’, the ‘here’ and the ‘there’, and therefore shapes the
experience of movement. The dwelling metaphor here is meant to capture that as we ‘move
through’ we also ‘move in’ given places.
In addition to stressing the place of ‘dwelling’ in movement, it is suggested the
imagination plays an important role in that ‘movement involves experiencing or
anticipating in one’s imagination’ the atmosphere and ambience of ‘another place’ (Urry
2007, 41). This is why art – which gives free reign to the imagination – is a valuable source
of data for reconstructing the imaginative aspects of movement. Urry (2007, 41) notes that
the poetry and literature of travel are to comprehending the ‘atmosphere or “feeling” of
particular kinds of movement’. Communication also takes the form of artefacts such as
‘photographs, letters, images, souvenirs and . . . [other] objects that people carry with
them . . . to reassemble memories, practices and even landscapes’ (Urry 2007, 41). These
communicative artefacts could be said to mediate absence and presence; they serve as
totems and reminders of where we have been.

Music and the sensation of movement

Totems or symbols of where we have been and of where we wish to go. How do symbols
perform this trick? Let’s consider the case of music. Socio-cultural studies of music have
recently experienced something of a ‘mobile turn’ through the groundbreaking work of
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 43

Michael Bull and Tia De Nora. In his study of various auditory technologies (see Bull 2000,
2001a, 2003, 2006a for Walkman use; See Bull 2001b, 2003, 2004, 2006a for stereo use in
automobiles; See Bull 2005, 2006a, 2006b and 2007 for iPod use), Bull’s (2007, 4)
overriding interest is in how the ‘isolated, yet mediated, urban subject’ uses auditory
technologies to navigate urban space. Taking the iPod as an example, Bull (2003, 288)
argues that the individual is able to ‘negate public spaces though their prioritization of their
own technologically mediated private realm’. This involves users transferring themselves
from the aural experience of the urban space to, as it were, their own private ‘sonic bubble’.
Auditory technologies like the iPod can therefore be seen as providing a means by
which the individual is able to ‘travel’ imaginatively to a private aural world. These
technologies ‘increasingly enable users to successfully maintain a sense of intimacy whilst
moving through the city’ (Bull 2003, 280). They allow users to ‘dwell’ while moving
about urban space. Bull explicitly refers to the technology as a providing a type of ‘home’:
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The space of reception might be described as a form of mobile home. The ‘outside’ world
becomes a function of the desire of the user and is maintained through time through the act of
listening . . . the world becomes one with the experience of the personal stereo user. (Bull
2003, 285)
In her various studies of the role of music in everyday situations, such as erotic
encounters, shopping spaces and physical exercise, DeNora (1999) explores how
individuals use music as a ‘technology of the self’ (see also DeNora 1997, 2002). She
suggests that music acts as an:
[A]ccomplice in attaining, enhancing and maintaining desired states of feelings and bodily
energy (e.g. relaxation); it is a vehicle . . . to move out of dispreferred states (e.g. stress,
fatigue). It is a resource for modulating and structuring the parameters of aesthetic agency –
feeling, motivation, comportment, action, style, and energy . . . Music’s specific properties –
its rhythms, gestures, harmonies, styles, and so on – are used as referents or representations of
‘where’ they wish to go, emotionally, physically, and so on. (DeNora 1999, 37 – 8)
The above formulation is dripping with mobility metaphors. Music is a ‘vehicle’ for
transporting ourselves emotionally and a symbol of where we have been or want to go.
Music in this sense has the capacity to move individuals emotionally into different states
of being. We see the ability of music to allow us to engage in ‘imaginative travel’ in that
it allows us to remember persons, places or moments in time. As DeNora (2000, 63; see
also DeNora 1999) points out in a study of women’s use of music in intimate culture:
’Music helped them to recall lovers or former partners and, with these memories,
emotionally heightened phases or moments in their lives’. Music specifically reminded
them of
[W]ho they ‘were’ at a certain time – a moment, a season, an era – and helps them to
recapture the aesthetic agency they possessed (or which possessed them) at the time. ‘Re-
living’ experience through music is also (re)constituting past experience, it is making manifest
within memory what may have been latent or even absent the first-time-through. (DeNora
2000, 65 – 6)
If music is implicated in imaginative travel through memory and time- or place-
specific connotations, how about its role in corporeal movement? The connection between
music and actual corporeal movement is evident in DeNora (2000) study of the use of
music in aerobics classes. She finds that music is an essential ‘orientation setting’ for the
experience. For DeNora (2000, 92) music is ‘a device upon which body conditions and
conduct may be mapped . . . it defines the components of a session through its tempo
changes (for example, music for warm-up, core and cool-down)’. Music plays an integral
role in the constitution of physical movements throughout an exercise regime. To us this
 44 E. de la Fuente et al.

suggests the dynamic interplay between movement and communication. What is an

aerobic regime without the music? During the exercise, the body is propelled and
rhythmically inscribed by the music.

Music and travelling: The case of Levi-Strauss

The notion that music allows us to be ‘taken back’ to some other time, or some other place,
means that it is hard to separate physical from imaginative movement in communication
processes. Indeed, an interesting theoretical exposition upon how walking and music are
‘knotted’ together – one that predates the advent of technologies like the iPod – is
provided by the French anthropologist, Levi-Strauss (1974) in his Tristes Tropiques.
In one of the most evocative passages in modern social science writing, Levi-Strauss
(1974, 376– 7), narrates how during a long and demanding ethnographic journey through
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the Matto Grosso region of Brazil, ‘[w]hat came to [him] were fleeting visions of the
French countryside’ and ‘snatches of music and poetry which were the ‘most conventional
expressions of a culture he had left behind’. Suffering from the discomforts associated
with travel, the anthropologist found that ‘[t]hrough a remarkable paradox, [his] life of
adventure, instead of opening up a new world to [him], had the effect rather of bringing
[him] back to the old one’ (Levi-Strauss 1974, 376). As his travels through the Matto
Grosso became more physically and mentally challenging, a certain melody, Chopin’s
Etude no.3, Opus 10, for piano, started to haunt him:
Mile after mile, the same melodic phrase rang through my memory, and I could not get rid of
it. It seemed constantly to reveal fresh charms. After beginning very slackly, it appeared to be
twisting its thread as if to conceal its approaching termination. The knotting became
progressively more inextricable . . . [and with each new note] the path of escape appeared all
the bolder . . . Perhaps . . . this was what traveling was, an exploration of the deserts of my
mind rather than of those surrounding me? (Levi-Strauss 1974, 377–8)
What is Levi-Strauss trying to tell us: that he failed as an ethnographer? That in
travelling, we never really leave home? Or that music – the most temporal of the arts –
mirrors movement? Possibly, all of these things. However, what interests us here is how
communication and movement become – in Levi-Strauss’s words – ‘knotted’ together.
How does something physical and corporeal become inextricably entwined with
something cognitive and affective, or vice versa?
Part of the solution to the Levi-Strauss puzzle, for us, lies in its historical context.
Tristes Tropiques is an elegy to a disappearing era of epic journeys and of ethnographic
texts written before the advent of National Geographic, the modern television documentary
or for that matter the recording of travel photographs and videos through social networking
sites on the Internet. The poignancy of Levi-Strauss’ theorization of music and movement
through space lies therefore precisely in its quaintness and anachronistic flavour. That the
ethnographic journey could resemble the unfolding of a Chopin Etude made more sense
before we were flooded with multiple forms of connectivity.

Before travel and communication became differentiated

In hinting at the fact that Levi-Strauss’ ‘knotting’ of music and memory, communication
and travel, may have a decidedly anachronistic quality, we are also suggesting that
communication and movement may not have always been as differentiated as they are
today. Scholars have reflected on the struggle to get people to see that communication and
transportation are connected and have tended to suggest that this might have been a problem
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 45

for those living in twentieth or twenty-firstcentury (see Sterne 2006b). Not so, for those
reared to a backdrop of nineteenth-century communication technologies and practices.
Thus, Peters (1999, 7 – 8) notes that the link between physical movement and
communication was common enough in the nineteenth century and that Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables makes reference to a character whom approached the
‘door that formed the customary communication between the house and the garden’.
Sterne (2006b, 118) further reminds us that the term ‘[m]etaphor comes from the Greek for
“to transfer” or “to carry”’ and there are various ‘historical precedents’ for seeing
‘communication as a subspecies of movement’.
So if communication and transport ceased to be thought of together what caused this
historical rupture? Carey (1989, 215) claims that it was the telegraph that ‘provided the
decisive and cumulative break of the identity of communication and transportation’. The
technology lead to the ‘discovery’ that, ‘not only can information move independently of
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and faster than physical entities, but it can also be a simulation of . . . what was left behind’
(Carey 1989, 215). From this point onwards, transport and communication came to be seen
as independent of each other except in theory and metaphor (e.g., the ‘transmission’ view
of communication).
Sterne questions whether the telegraph itself signalled the end of the link between
transport and communication. He shows that the infrastructures of transportation and
communication have often worked in tandem throughout the modern period:
It starts with postal roads, seaways, and riverways in the eighteenth century and continues in a
series of cobbled-together forms over the next two centuries: trains and telegraph lines, radio
and phone lines . . . cables for telephone traffic and network television, combined with
interstate highways and, later, satellites’ (Sterne 2006b, 120– 1).
Sterne (2006b, 121) adds that the ‘physical infrastructure of the Internet continues to
retrace this intertwined history’.
In any case, as Schivelbusch (1986) tells us, technologies such as the train opened up a
whole host of imaginative and symbolic associations connected with travel. The railway
carriage, paradoxically, forced passengers to be silent in the presence of others but also to
take up new forms of communication such as reading newspapers and novels. That
relationship between movement and the need to communicate is still with us in the age of
the Internet. And, as we have consistently argued in this paper, the ongoing relationship
between communication and movement is reason enough to consider whether the link is in
some respects primordial. Revisiting social theories prior to the divide between
communication and transportation might provide a few clues.

Classical social theory and movement-centred communication

It is noteworthy that two of the pioneers of North American communication theory,
Charles Horton Cooley and Harold Innis, both undertook doctoral investigations of
railway transportation. Completed in 1894, at the University of Michigan, and in 1920, at
the University of Chicago, respectively, the doctoral work of Cooley and Innis points to a
time when the disciplinary divide between the study of communication and transportation
was not yet set in stone.
However, the clearest indication that turn-of-the-century thought had not yet divided
these two fields into separate realms of study are the writings of Georg Simmel. His
writings are saturated with a concern with mobility and the kind of experience it furnishes.
As various commentators have suggested, Simmel’s work addresses themes pursued by
vitalism and Lebensphilosophie (see Lash 2005). As such, he was more attentive to the flux
 46 E. de la Fuente et al.

of life than most so-called ‘classical’ sociological theorists. Indeed, Simmel (1965, 327)
conceived of social science as the study of the social relationships which ‘continuously
emerge and cease and emerge again; eternal flux and pulsation link individuals’. He also
explicitly analysed experiences of movement such as the ‘adventure’ and the ‘Alpine
journey’ (Simmel 1991, 1997, 221 –32).
What can Simmel offer a communication theory that wants to be more attentive to
movement? In addition to focusing on the role of the senses in social life (see his
‘Sociology of the Senses’, Simmel 1997, 109 – 19), Simmel (1997, 174) proposes that ‘the
human being is the connecting creature who must always separate and cannot connect
without separating’. And, what is communication if not connection? Or the connecting of
what appears differentiated?
Simmel (1997, 170) highlights that the symbolic life of humans is driven by the
‘transformation of materials as well as energies’ that allows everything to be brought ‘into
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relationship with everything else and make one cosmos out of all the individual elements’.
Social life, and by association the communication process, are recast as the ‘human will to
connection’ (Simmel 1997, 171).
Simmel’s essay of 1909, entitled ‘Bridge and Door’, explains why communication
is predicated on the ‘will to connection’. As with Peters’ and Sterne’s allusions to
communication as exchange and intercourse (e.g., trains and corridors), Simmel theorizes
doors, walls, bridges and paths as forms of communication that connect human energies
and ‘spiritual’ activities. He says, for example, of the bridge that it ‘gives to the eye the
same support for connecting the sides of the landscape as it does to the body for practical
reality’ (Simmel 1997, 171 – 2). Simmel adds that while the actual ‘purpose’ of the bridge
is to give material form to the ‘dynamics of motion’ this does not ‘exhaust’ its aesthetic
and emotional value. The bridge gives us pleasure – hence, its association with the
‘picturesque’ – by virtue of ‘the fortuitous relationships to the banks that it connects’
(Simmel 1997, 172). Similarly, the path and road ‘freeze movement into a solid structure’
that symbolizes our volition over ‘space’ (Simmel 1997, 172). And, the difference
between a wall and a door is couched in the following manner: the former is a ‘dead
constraint’ upon the forces of life, whereas, in the latter, ‘life flows forth out . . . in all
possible directions’. As such the door is a means of communication whereas the wall is
not. Simmel (1997,172) surmises: ‘Precisely because [the door] . . . can . . . be opened, its
closure provides the feeling of a stronger isolation against everything outside this space
than the mere unstructured wall. The latter is mute, but the door speaks’.
Urry (2007, 26) quips that the ‘mobilities paradigm’ had to wait another ‘hundred
years to get out of the garage since Simmel first sketched the prototype nearly a century
ago’ (on recent attempts to connect Simmel to the ‘information age’ and ‘cyberspace’ see
Lash [2005] and Bogard [1999] respectively). However, some of the themes developed by
Simmel were pursued by one of his American students: namely, Robert Ezra Park.
Park (1952, 92) suggests that ‘mind is an incident of locomotion’ and distinguishes
mere ‘movement’ from ‘locomotion’. The latter, he takes to be the capacity to ‘respond to
stimulation’ noting that ‘plants don’t locomote . . . [in that] when they do move, . . . they
have no goal, no destination, and that is because they have no imagination’ (Park 1952,
92). ‘Everything higher than an oyster’, suggests Park (1952, 92), is capable of locomotion
to the extent that the organism in question can ‘define the direction in which [they] are
going to move, and locate in imagination the goal that [they] intend to seek’. For him,
mental activity and the stimulation of the imagination through movement are one and
the same.
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 47

However, in his reflections upon the social psychology of the ‘hobo’, Park suggests
that perpetual movement can also induce ‘boredom’ and a certain level of despair. He
suggests that the problem with the hobo is that he is ‘always on the move’ and that he
therefore has ‘no destination’ (Park 1952, 93). Simmel’s (1997, 170) insight that the
sedentary person is better placed to enjoy the benefits of mobility, he suggests the hobo’s
wanderlust deprives him or her of one of the central benefits of ‘location’: one ‘must be
located . . . in order to maintain communication’ (Park 1952, 93).
In summary, we would argue that through Simmel and the Chicago School of
sociology (Park, Thomas, Goffman, etc) the theoretical significance of movement was
kept alive within early forms of communication study. Interestingly, Carey’s (1989, 23)
Communication as Culture cites this tradition as offering ‘a definition of communication
of disarming simplicity yet . . . of some intellectual power and scope: communication is a
symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed’.
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While we value Carey’s emphasis on communication as process and activity, we think the
Simmel-Park version of the tradition also adds a further dimension: the notion of
communication as connection and of movement as something that triggers sensory and
imaginative impressions.
Ironically, it is in the essay on the hobo, that Park arrives at one of his key insights
regarding the role of communication. He says:
The extraordinary means of communication that characterize modern society – the
newspaper, the radio, and the telephone, are merely devices for preserving [the] permanence
of location . . . in connection with the greatest possible mobility and freedom of its members.
(1952, 94)
Park and his collaborators in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago
also saw no essential distinction between the study of communication and the study of
urban social processes. Their message seemed to be that a social science of the city should
focus as much on ‘social conveniences’ such as ‘streets, buildings, electric lights,
tramways, and telephones’, as on the ‘customs and traditions’ of a city, ‘and the organized
attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted within these
traditions’ (Park 1967, 1). In summary, the city as communication consists of the
connections afforded both by its physical infrastructure and by its cultural styles, moods,
and everyday practices.
The city is not unique in this respect. All of social life is predicated on communication
as connection and movement. Park (1967, 157) suggests it is from ‘locomotion . . . that the
peculiar type of organization that we call “social” develops’.

Conclusion
We have argued in this article that communication is a product of connection and of the
impressions made upon the social actor by the senses of sight, sound, touch and kinesics.
To the extent that sense impressions function together (i.e., one can’t really separate neatly
the eye from kinesics or vice versa), all communication involves movement – or at least
the registering of motion upon the senses.
We trust that the current vogue for mobile media studies and the onset of the
‘mobilities paradigm’ will do much to revive theories and methods that reconnect travel
and communication, movement and the study of medium properties. However, we hope to
have shown that the sensation of movement is not technology-specific as is evident in how
music functions as a medium that – whether present in the recollections of the individual
 48 E. de la Fuente et al.

or as a digital file on someone’s iPod – readily becomes entangled with actual physical
movements such as walking, commuting and dwelling in certain spaces.
In the limited space available to us, and in a slightly essayistic vein, we also attempted
to argue that returning to social theories of communication before the big divide between
transport and communication would be a fruitful exercise. The suggestion – albeit
somewhat programmatic and preliminary – is that one could do worse than revisit the kind
of interpretative social science that Simmel pioneered and the Chicago School developed
into the ethnography of urban life.

Notes on contributors
Eduardo de la Fuente has an interdisciplinary background in the fields of communication studies,
sociology and social theory. He has held positions at the University of Tasmania and Macquarie
University prior to coming to Monash University, and is currently a Faculty Fellow of the Yale
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Center for Cultural Sociology. He has published essays in journals such as Sociological Theory,
Cultural Sociology, Journal of Classical Sociology, Journal of Sociology, European Journal of
Social Theory, Thesis Eleven and Distinktion: The Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, as well as
a monograph, entitled, Twentieth Century Music and the Question of Modernity (Routledge, 2010);
and co-edited (with Peter Murphy) Philosophical and Cultural Theories of Music (Brill, 2010).
John Budarick has a PhD from the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at
Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His research interests include media, space and
belonging and he is currently undertaking research into the use of media by diasporas in Australia.
He has been published in the Journal of Sociology and Colloquy: theory, text, critique.
Michael Walsh has a PhD from the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. His research interests include Communications, Music
Sociology and Erving Goffman. His PhD dissertation is an empirical investigation of musical
listening throughout everyday life. He has been published in the Australian Journal of
Communication, Studies in Symbolic Interactionism and recently has had a chapter published in
the edited collection Philosophical and Cultural Theories of Music (Brill, 2010). He is currently a
co-convener of the TASA Cultural Sociology Thematic Group.

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