DigiPlay: Experience and Consequence of Technologies of Leisure

Mobile Leisure and the Technological Mediascape

Oak Suite, Dept of Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH
26th April 2004

On the road and on-line: redefining leisure travel in the age of mobile media technologies

Jennie Germann Molz
jennie@globalivity.com
Department of Sociology, University of Lancaster.

If new mobile media technologies are changing the way we live and work in our everyday lives, they are also transforming the way we play while we are away. Drawing on a study of round-the-world travel websites, this paper explores the way round-the-world travellers have incorporated the Internet into their corporeal travel practices and, in the process, have reconfigured some of the social meanings of long-term leisure travel. As travellers are increasingly travelling *with* the Internet as well as *on* it, a new genre of _interactive travel_ has emerged that challenges traditional notions of travel. Instead of casting leisure travel in terms of escape from the routines of home and work or from social obligations, interactive travel enables new forms of connectivity and sociability for travellers while they are on the road. This paper explores a series of mobile social relations made possible by new forms of interactive travel and suggests directions for further research on the intersection between virtual and corporeal mobilities.

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