Hypermobility and Expressive Life

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Abstract

Moving and expressing are cognates, but how far does this relationship extend beyond our bodies, and what is its condition today? To address these questions, the paper introduces the concept of *hypermobility* — a condition wherein online attention and in-person attending become mutually reinforcing. Attending underexplored places drives online attention, while online visibility draws in-person attendance.

The paper argues that hypermobility is facilitated by technologies developed in the 2000s and popularized in the 2010s — mobile devices, GPS, and P2P platforms — which drastically reduced the transaction costs of social timespace. Compared to their 20th-century counterparts, today's hypermobile subjects enjoy more flexible travel and living arrangements, richer geosocial information, and greater access to publicity. Something interesting is probably happening somewhere else, and they want in.

Three cultural expressions of hypermobility are explored — travel influencing, popups, and drill music — each illustrating a distinctive interplay between geographic mobility and online expression.
Beyond this macrosociological scope, the paper intervenes at the theoretical level, targeting two presuppositions embedded in popular cultural sociology: the presupposition of *definite meanings* (cognitivist theories) and *self-contained situations* (pragmatist theories). Drawing on Georg Simmel and the mobilities turn he helped inspire, the paper argues these are static assumptions in need of mobilizing. Meanings are better understood as *provisional* — nourishing to agency, fleeting in experience, and linking past to future. Situations are better understood as potentially *momentous* — participating in transsituational formations which generate memorable moments by allowing situations to recall, and anticipate, each other.

A core Simmelian insight runs throughout: the dynamic *how* of encounter often matters more to the sense of significance than the physical *what*, as it configures our expressive stance toward experience. This insight illuminates cultural life well beyond hypermobility specifically. Ultimately, mobilizing our thinking allows cultural analysis to better appreciate the expressive dimension of culture and its ongoing transformations.

Author

• Khalil James Martin, University of Toronto