Moderated waiting. How new technologies reshape and mediate waiting in mobilities

Abstract

Physical movement is closely interrelated with temporal stasis or waiting for mobilities. Despite unbroken efforts to reduce or even eliminate waiting in planning, and persisting bias in economics and social sciences to privilege speed over slowness, there seems growing consensus among mobility scholars to acknowledge waiting as immanent and unavoidable constituent of any movement and transportation, hence as “mobility’s twin” (Hanson 2010: 6). Yet, while speed and acceleration have been widely studied, waiting however still remains “a temporal region hardly mapped and badly documented” (Schweizer 2008: 1).
Against that background, the paper aims to examine how in the last 20 years new technologies have reshaped and mediated the individual and collective waiting experience at most prominent material interchanges of speed and temporal stasis, such as train platforms or airport gates. While material waiting environments (platforms, benches, waiting zones) remained rather unchanged, today the omnipresent use of private mobile devices at those places and boosted installation of GPS-based real-time passenger information seem to bear a new and yet ambiguous dynamic for renegotiating the waiting experience in mobilities. Such new technologies might undoubtedly minimize and ease waiting’s unpleasant characteristics by providing certain, measurable and moderated information, but as time-sensibility however remains problematically high in contemporary societies, I suggest that we might not miss the chance to conceptualize waiting as a different temporal resource or “meaningful experience” (Gasparini 1995: 32) beyond productivist perceptions as sheer waste of time.
Recognizing waiting as an integral and unavoidable part of mobility, the paper finally aims to provide ideas of how a constructive appraisal of waiting, rather than its illusive technological avoidance, and a more sociological approach to time, might also become more generally a basis to rethink speed and travel time perceptions in the 21st century.

Full text

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