This article introduces a special issue on “The touristification of work in the post-digital city”. It outlines how contemporary cities are being reshaped by two intertwined dynamics: the touristification of work and the rise of post-digital urbanism. As mobile technologies and flexible labor practices enable people to blend work with travel, new forms of “touristified work” emerge, including phenomena like “workation”, digital nomadism, and coworking cultures that frame work as an experience. At the same time, growing unease with constant connectivity fuels post-digital trends that valorize disconnection, analogue practices, artisanal labour, and spatial rootedness. Together, these developments foster alternative formations of lifestyles, values and sentiments, or, what might be seen as articulations of a new urban structure of feeling. The special issue brings together interdisciplinary contributions that examine how cities enable and accommodate to these shifting formations through the touristified staging of (post-)digital urban work spaces and how touristified work mobilities and identities reshape the very meaning of cities under post-digital conditions. Through empirical cases from Europe, Asia, and North America, the issue advances a critical understanding of the post-digital city as a space of aspiration, phantasmagoria, and contradiction.

Society and culture are increasingly marked by post-digital developments where the normalization of digital connectivity is challenged both through critical resistance, e.g., digital disconnection practices, and in commercial discourses on, e.g., “digital wellbeing” and “digital detox.” This article seeks to understand such post-digital trends in working life through the lens of romantic ideals. In modern history, the Romantic ethic implied an escape into the beautiful, the genuine, and the sublime. While constituting a counter-force to functionalism, it also shaped the evolution of modern consumerism through the embracing of novelty and imagination. Here, the analytical focus is on coworking spaces (CWS), a form of digitally reliant workspaces where mobile workers can rent a desk or an office for a limited period of time and where disconnection and non-digital features are promoted as ingredients of “good work.” Previous research shows that many CWS, while promoted as consumable destinations, function as anchoring places and environments for gaining a sense of presence and peace under digitally networked conditions. The current analysis extends these arguments through a case study of a CWS in an early-gentrifying part of Oslo, Norway. Based on ethnographic observations and interviews, the article shows how four romantic tropes—novelty, authenticity, creativity, and harmony—saturate spatial production as well as the mindsets of coworkers. It is concluded that CWS form part of a neo-romantic movement that includes a plethora of related post-digital phenomena, together constituting a counter-culture within capitalist consumer society.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on a collective of international scholars who are researching at the intersections of media, mobility and sociality. It explores the divergent vantage points of the interplay between mobilities and socialities, analysing material conditions, situated contexts and the ascribed meanings to people’s movements, their media practices and social relations. The book argues that mobile socialities is not only concerned with connections across media, mobility and sociality, but also with the contrary reality of material and imaginary worlds. It explores how the concept is used to question earlier works, and addresses a core theme of the individual and their digital networks in previous research. The book addresses the question of breathing – both metaphorically as well as in real terms: without lungs that move, nothing else counts.

This chapter sheds light on mobile socialities via a focus on bicycling food couriers, a group of workers who holds a peripheral position in the power geometry of mobility. The absence of proper workplace justifies a particular focus on the mobile phone. Hence, the chapter is a theoretical enquiry in order to elaborate the all-encompassing role of the mobile phone for this kind of work; how it is both a prerequisite for the execution of it and crucial for the comfort between the jobs, enabling social interaction as well as distraction. The socio-material conditions in this new type of work environment, I argue, constitute a kind of mobile sociality, where the two 'entities', mobility and sociality, are articulated in new configurations. The chapter highlights the entanglement of online and offline in transport work; how these dimensions are interdependent in the mobile work. It also highlights the dialectic between mobility and immobility, which in this context is context is expressed as working (mobility) and waiting (immobility). The chapter discusses how the waiting can be utilized. Waiting, according to Ben Highmore, is time for distraction which in turn may be understood as 'mobility of attention'. In this context it means that the individual courier may appropriate a slice of time and space to build a social and emotional structure for oneself. He or she is dwelling; feeling at home through familiar mobile phone practices and through communication with close ones. The chapter ends with a discussion on how the oscillation between work and dwelling can be used for elaborations on the dialectic between mobility and immobility, and how this may be theorized through the concepts 'ambient (mobile phone) practices' and 'ambient communication'.

This is a state-of-the-art survey of an emerging area of study in media, communication and cultural studies, mobility studies and mobile communications.

‘Mobile socialities’ demarcates a new area of research that captures people’s various and contrary experiences of media in relation to their mobilities and socialities. The chapters in this volume are written by a range of international scholars offering a comprehensive overview and source of inspiration for a diverse range of topics on the contingent practices and finite resources of people and media on the move. The book demonstrates through empirical and theoretical research how mobile socialities is a generative concept for thinking through power, identity and the contexts of media in public and mediated spaces, work and everyday life, addressing a spectrum of mobile socialities and lived politics. The research and various cases make visible previously hidden, or obscured, social practices and allow us to rethink the meanings of mobility, digital media or the home in these examples of people living within the centre and peripheries of society.

The Handbook establishes mobile socialities as a new area of academic enquiry, ideal for advanced undergraduate students and scholars across the disciplines of media, communication and cultural studies, anthropology, cultural geography and sociology.

Digital technologies have changed and will continue to change the way we think, live and work. Working and Organizing in the Digital Age presents case studies, analyses and graphic illustrations of how various digital technologies transform work processes and affect the working lives of professionals. The anthology draws upon knowledge bases and perspectives from multiple disciplines to facilitate a holistic, critical and innovative investigation of the transformational potential of digitalization on working and organizing.