Digitalised Mobilities: Connectivity, Belonging, and Sociotechnical Power

Digitalisation is changing the social conditions, patterns and driving mechanisms of mobility. Platforms, algorithmic systems, data infrastructures and generative AI reorganise how social relations are sustained across time and spaces. They reshape the relation between mobility and mediated presence, the production of proximity across distance, and the conditions under which connectivity becomes participation.

This session approaches digitalised mobilities as sociotechnically mediated capacities to connect, participate and act across social, spatial, and temporal boundaries. These capacities shape social relations, economic life, belonging, and the production and circulation of knowledge. They also influence how people position themselves in relation to communities, institutions and imagined futures.

Access to these capacities is uneven and institutionally organised. Digital systems may widen participation and enable new forms of association. They may also generate dependence, exclusion and new forms of inequalities. Sociotechnical systems increasingly organise visibility, classification, circulation and social recognition.

The session invites sociological research that situates these transformations within broader processes of institutional change, social inequality, and development, with particular attention to how digitalised mobilities shape social connection, participation, recognition, and agency.