Mobile Ideas: Tracking a Concept through Time and Space

Abstract

John Urry’s defining work on mobilities calls for research into the movement of people, ideas and information. This article identifies that as things stand the work of the ‘mobilities turn’ has tended to concentrate almost exclusively on the movement of people and information and has given far less attention to the mobility of ideas. In order to address this absence this article focuses upon one idea in particular, the Spime neologism, and attempts to understand its movement, the systems that enable it and the implications it creates. This article demonstrates the potential offered by the contemporary mediascape for tracking, tracing and visualising the mobility of ideas.