It takes ten hours to fly from Milan to New York, two hours from Genoa to London, and four hours by train from Turin to Lyon. Not to mention the MagLev train , which travels without touching the tracks thanks to magnetic levitation. The Japanese decided to build a line of this kind, which travels at a speed of 501 km/h and covers the Tokyo-Nagoya route in just 40 minutes. Can you imagine if you had told a medieval man that all this would one day be possible? He probably would have thought you were crazy. Obviously, not the entire world is efficiently connected; in fact, there are still many areas with poor connections, especially in our beautiful country.
How do we analyze all this from a sociological point of view?
To address this topic, we can draw on the sociologist and political scientist Anthony Giddens and the process he called " disembedding ," meaning that in today's society, relationships between people are experienced outside of local contexts and are translated across distant time and space. Therefore, our living conditions do not depend on entirely personal choices, but on economic and political decisions about how to invest funds in projects to improve communication routes and media (a clear example is social networks ).
A new unit of measurement
It's clear that mobility in space has increased: too often we hear conversations like: "How far is place x from place y ? It'll be a two-hour drive." We no longer measure distance with traditional units, but with the number of hours and minutes it takes to get from one end to the other. We increasingly use the unit of time . We have different means of transport that travel at different speeds and subcategories of these, each faster than the next. A journey of a few hundred kilometers might seem interminable to us, while another of thousands seems "light." It seems incredible how technology in this sector has made giant strides in the last century and how much progress it still has to make. Distance will be less and less of a problem in an increasingly globalized world , with the advantages and disadvantages that this entails.
Philip Campo Antico
