Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp.

244262, 2007 0160-7383/$ - see front matter 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Printed in Great Britain

www.elsevier.com/locate/atoures

doi:10.1016/j.annals.2006.08.002

NETWORKS AND TOURISM

Mobile Social Life
Jonas Larsen Roskilde University, Denmark John Urry Lancaster University, UK Kay W. Axhausen ETH, Institute for Transport Planning and Systems, Switzerland
Abstract: This article shows that much tourism should no longer be seen as marginal and by implication unnecessary. Rather, traveling, visiting, and hosting are necessary to social life conducted at-a-distance. It is argued here that research has neglected issues of sociality and corporeal copresence and thereby overlooked how more and more tourism is concerned with (re)producing social networkswith (re)visiting and receiving the hospitality of friends and kin living elsewhere and fullling social obligations. The article documents how much tourism is not an isolated exotic island but a signicant set of relations connecting and reconnecting disconnected people in face-to-face proximities where obligations and pleasures can go hand in hand. Keywords: mobility, social networks, proximities, obligations, visiting. 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Resume: Reseaux et tourisme: vie sociale mobile. Cet article montre que le tourisme ne devrait pas etre vu comme marginal et donc inutile. Voyager, rendre visite et recevoir sont plutot necessaires a une vie sociale a distance. On soutient que la recherche a neglige les ` ` questions de la sociabilite, la co-presence corporelle et le fait que de plus en plus de tourisme est une affaire de (re) produire des reseaux sociaux de rendre visite et de recevoir lhospit alite de la famille et des amis qui habitent ailleurs et de remplir des obligations sociales. Larti cle montre que beaucoup de tourisme nest pas une le exotique mais un ensemble de relations entre personnes deconnectees dans des proximites face-a-face ou obligations ` ` et plaisir peuvent aller de pair. Mots-cles: mobilite, reseaux sociaux, proximites, obligations, visites. 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

INTRODUCTION The last decade or so has seen striking increases in tourism in general, business tourism, and migration, and in communications at-a-distance through mobile phone calls, text messaging, emailing, videoconferences, and so on. The rich societies of the West and North have experienced a remarkable time-space compression (Harvey

Jonas Larsen (Department for Geography, Roskilde University, postbox 260, 4000 Roskilde, Denmark. Email <jonaslar@ruc.dk>) publishes articles on photography and is coauthor of Performing Tourist Places. John Urrys books include The Tourist Gaze, Performing Tourist Places, and Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play. Kay Axhausen publishes in Transport Reviews, Transport Policy and Transportation. Together they have co-authored Mobilities, Networks and Geographies. 244

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1989:240), as people can travel to and connect with absent others faster, and more conveniently and cheaply than before. Such societies seem to have shifted from little boxes, where there was strong, overlapping membership of different social groups, to a system of networks where connections are spatially dispersed and membership in one does not necessarily overlap with others (Wellman 2002). Time-space compression can also involve time-space distanciation (Giddens 1990:1819) or the spatial stretching of social networks. More people on the move, in search of work, education, love, peace, and home, have close connections with others at-a-distance and they must travel considerable distances to visit and to receive the hospitality of their close friends and family members (Urry 2000). As Franklin and Crang argue, it seems almost impossible not to see tourist studies as one of the most exciting and relevant topics in these transnational times . . . and yet it is not (2001:5). This is partly because mainstream research still treat tourism as a predominantly exotic set of specialized consumer products that occur at specic places and times. By contrast, this article shows that tourism studies should be of wider relevance to the social sciences because tourism, visits, and hospitality have moved to the center stage of many peoples more mobile lives. It is demonstrated that the practices and meanings of tourism multiply and move into other aspects of mobility and social life: through business tourism, migration, family life, and friendship. Studies have mostly neglected issues of sociality and copresence and overlooked how much tourism is concerned with (re)producing social relations. Aggregate statistical data partly document the changing signicance of tourism for visiting friends and relatives. World Tourism Organization statistics show that in 2001 there were 154 million international arrivals for VFR [visiting friends and relatives] health, religion, other, compared with 74 million in 1990. The average annual growth was 8.5%. In the same period, conventional trips undertaken for leisure, recreation and holidays only increased 4.2% per annum. In 1990 there were ve times more leisure, recreation and holidays tourists than VFR, health, religion, other tourists; but by 2001 this reduced to a little more than twice as many (WTO 2005). This turn to the social can be seen in relationship to recent international arrivals to the United Kingdom. While holiday visits to this country between 19992003 fell 1.8 million to 8.0 million, visits to friends or relatives increased by 1.3 million to 7.0 million. Thus, almost as many international tourists state that they visit the United Kingdom to see their daughter or their best friend as to visit Big Ben or the Lake District (Travel Trends 2004). Connections at-a-distance are widespread and travel to meet with signicant others is more feasible, as many places are within reach quickly and cheaply. This indicates that much tourism should not necessarily be seen as marginal. Rather traveling, visiting, and hosting are necessary to much social life conducted at-a-distance. This article argues that tourism often involves connections with, rather than escape from, social relations and the multiple obligations of everyday social life (this argument partly critiques Urry 1990). It de-exoticizes the understanding of

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tourism, it discusses how social obligations and the need for proximity to signicant others generate tourism, and how it is coupled with its other forms. It draws upon research on social networks and mobility among youngish employees in the northwest of England to analyze how such people use tourism to connect their social networks. Here tourism is taken to refer to all kind of non-work-related physical travel that results in at least one overnight stay away from home, but for no more than a year. This denition roughly distinguishes it from day trips, business tourism, and migration. Yet the nature of tourism will not be effectively examined by drawing inappropriate borders around it. DE-EXOTICISING TOURISM Much early theory denes the nature of tourism through some rather xed dualisms: leisure as opposed to work, away as opposed to home, authenticity as opposed to inauthenticity, the extraordinary as opposed to the ordinary, and guest as opposed to host (Cohen 1972; MacCannell 1976; Smith 1978; Urry 1990). These distinctions identify worthwhile places or moments of the tourist gaze. Cohen argued that tourism is essentially a temporary reversal of everyday activitiesit is a no-work, no-care, no-thrift situation (1972:181). The tourism escape is portrayed as special event (such as the annual summer holiday) taking place in contained places designed, regulated, or preserved more or less specically for tourism, such as resorts, sightseeing buses, hotels, attractions, paths, promenades, and beaches. It is an escape from the ordinary and a quest for more desirable and fullling places to consume (Urry 1995). Differences among tourists are explained in terms of the places they are attracted to and how they consume them, visually or bodily, romantically or collectively, as high-cultural texts or liminal playgrounds, or places where the active body comes to life (the literature on pilgrimage is a little different in its emphases). In MacCannell (1976) and Urry (1990), the tourist is portrayed as a sightseer, visually consuming places through gazing, photographing, and collecting signs. The experience is narrowed down to one of facing places. Veijola and Jokinnen (1994) were among the rst to suggest that this (male) visual paradigm overlooks the corporeality of practices. Recently, however, male theoristsalongside women researchers such as Johnston (2000) and Wearing and Wearing (1996)have turned to ideas of embodiment and performance to destabilize the visual hegemony of images, cameras, and gazes (Brenholdt, Haldrup, Larsen and Urry 2004; Coleman and Crang 2002; Edensor 2000; Franklin 2003; Franklin and Crang 2001). This literature demonstrates how, inter alia, backpackers, adventure tourists, and families consume places by bodily immersion in the corporeal and cultural sensescapes of local cultures, mountains, and beaches. Whether researchers examine gazing or performing (Perkins and Thorns 2001), they agree that tourism is about place (Brenholdt et al 2004:1). However, this focus neglects issues of sociality, especially with signicant others. Insofar as questions of social relations are discussed, these are located within rather xed dichotomies of hosts and guests,

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or us and them (Smith 1978), and tourist and guides, where social relationships are instrumental, commodied, and ridden with power. Thus, it is necessary to analyze proximity, obligations, and meetingness in relation to mobility. Despite the proliferation of communication technologies, corporeal travel and copresent meetings are of increasing importance because they produce thick, embodied socialities of corporeal proximity where people are accessible, available, and subject to each another (Boden 1994; Urry 2002, 2003). Copresent interaction is fundamental to social interaction within institutions, families, and friendships, for producing trust, sustaining intimacy, and pleasurable gatherings. So far, virtual communications are often about coordinating physical travel and enabling talk in-between visits and meetings rather than substituting for corporeal travel. This theory and research indicates that the geographical stretching out of social networks makes tourism desirable and indeed necessary, because social networks so far do not only function through phone calls, texting, and email. One cannot share a meal or buy rounds or hug ones mother or cuddle ones grandchild or kiss the bride over the telephone or through an email or a videoconference. Unlike telephone conversations, where many struggle to talk for more than 15 to 30 minutes, people often talk for hours over a coffee, a restaurant meal, or drinks, because copresent talk is embodied and located within a shared physical place, temporarily at least full of life. Some places, indeed, are particularly ambient in especially affording the conditions for face-to-face sociality. Thus, one might say places can matter in VFR tourism, although differently from more straightforward sightseeing forms of tourism. Thus the increase in VFR trips stems from what Boden (1994) calls a compulsion to proximity, the desire to be physically copresent with other people (Boden and Molotch 1994). By contrast with professional, commercialized hospitality, VFR tourism is about being copresent with signicant faces, being their guests, and receiving their hospitality and perhaps enjoying their knowledge of local culture. It follows that contemporary tourists are often in effect both guests and hosts. Repeated hospitality is offered to people that also have open doors (this might be slightly different with family members), with systems of hospitality involving reciprocity. Some theory conceptualizes tourists as free-oating individuals seeking to maximize their hedonistic pleasures. It fails to notice the many obligations that choreograph tourism escapes which are more or less binding and pleasurable obligations requiring intermittent faceto-face copresence (Urry 2002). Elsewhere it is argued that it is necessary to distinguish between obligations to people, places, objects, and events, that some travel consists of combinations of these obligations, and that each results in a powerful need to be bodily present with people, place, object, or event (Larsen, Urry and Axhausen 2006b, 2006c). In particular, obligations to family and friends involve very strong normative expectations of presence and attention. One survey shows

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that 70% of UK respondents agree that people should keep in contact with close family members even if they dont have much in common (McGlone, Park and Roberts 1999:152). There are social customs, obligations, and activities that substantial majorities identify as among the top necessities of life. These events include celebrations on special occasions such as Christmas (83%) and attending weddings and funerals (80%), visits to friends or family (84%), especially to those in hospital (Gordon, Adelman, Ashwoth, Bradshaw, Middleton, Pantazis, Patsios, Payne, Townsend and Williams 2000). Fullling social obligations often requires copresence, performing rituals, and sustained quality time, often at particular moments. These obligations involve not only face-to-face talk but also sharing a well-prepared Christmas turkey, having an anniversary dinner, celebrating the Chinese New Year, exchanging birthday gifts, sipping champagne on New Years Eve, and so on. If these rituals do not take place at their right time, they cease to be meaningful. Telephone calls, text messages, or courier-delivered owers can only substitute for a journey to and physical presence at a church, hospital, or Christmas dinner, if people have a really good excuse for not being able to attend. Communications will often be thought too one-dimensional to fulll certain kinds of social obligation that cannot be missed. Fullling such obligations required relatively little long distance travel when walking and cycling were the major transport modes and social networks were socially and spatially close-knit. Indeed, recent research shows that people in advanced capitalist societies socialize less frequently with each other on such a weekly basis, indicating, some argue, a decline in social capital (McGlone et al 1999; Putnam 2001). Yet these studies overlook how some kinds of tourism can counteract this, since when distant friends or family members do meet up, each visit is likely to last longer and be especially meaningful. People may compensate for the intermittence of meetings and the cost of transport (time, money, weariness) by spending a whole day or weekend or week(s) together, often staying in each others homes. In other words, frequent but short visits may turn into intermittent yet longer periods of faceto-face copresence, of hosting and visiting. Obligations of visiting and showing hospitality become central to tourism and indeed social life at-a-distance, as cheaper and faster travel compresses stretched out networks. Thus, recent work has begun to challenge the traditional distinctions between home and away, the ordinary and the extraordinary, work and leisure, everyday life and holidays, by arguing that in transnational times tourism moves into less obviously touristic places. Franklin and Crang argue that:
Tourism is no longer a specialist consumer product or a mode of consumption: tourism has broken away from its beginning as a relatively minor and ephemeral ritual of modern life to become a signicant modality through which transnational modern life is organized . . . it can no longer be bounded off as a discrete activity, contained tidily at specic locations and occurring during set aside periods (2001:7).

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Therefore, tourism enters the lives of business people and global professionals, second homeowners and their friends and families, exchange students and gap-year workers abroad, migrants and (former) refugees, people with distant friends and kin, and even otherwise immobile people with friends and families in distant places. It becomes less the privilege of the rich few than something involving and affecting many people, as otherwise immobile individuals might occasionally visit or host distant kin or be heartbroken when they remain at-a-distance. The notions of dwelling-in-travel and traveling-in-dwelling (Clifford 1997:Chapter 1) deconstruct distinctions between home and away by pointing to the possibilities of being at home while traveling and coming home through travel. Kaplan (1996) describes how her family was scattered across the United States and other continents. Tourist travel was thus unavoidable, indisputable, and always necessary for family, love and friendship (1996:ix). Through it she came to be at home at various places and face-to-face with loved ones. Tourism, we may thus hypothesize, represents not just an escape from home but also a search for home(s). These notions enable researching how tourist type visits are essential to the lives of migrants, diasporic cultures, and their families and friends (Coles and Timothy 2004; Willams and Hall 2000). Many forms of migration, as Williams and Hall say, generate tourism ows, in particular through the geographical extension of friendship and kinship networks. Migrants may become poles of tourist ows, while they themselves become tourists in returning to visit friends and relations in their areas of origin (2000:7). OReilly (2003) shows how migration and tourism are complexly folded into each other in the case of British home owners on Spains Costa del Sol (Caletrio 2004; Gustafson 2002). Retirement migration from northern Europe to destinations in southern Europe generates much tourism. On average, retired immigrants receive seven visits a year from the United Kingdom, and two out of three of these migrants return home to this country at least once a year (Williams, King, Warnes and Patters 2000:4041). Such visits are clustered around Christmas, holiday periods, and important family events (birthday, wedding, funerals, and so on), indicating that they are tied into obligations of family life. Migration is far from a one-way journey of leaving ones homeland behind, but often a two-way journey between two sets of homes (Ahmed, Castaneda, Fortier and Sheller 2003). The migration process appears to require a return, a journey back to the point of departure (Goulborne 1999:193). This is particularly the case with many migrants who are members of distinct diasporas. While these traditionally entail a desire for a permanent return, todays migrants can fulll their compulsion to proximity with their homeland through frequent virtual communications and especially with occasional visits. In Trinidad, for example, it is said that one can really only be a proper Trini by going abroad and returning home occasionally to visit friends and kin. About 60% of nuclear families are thought to have

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at least one family member living abroad (Miller and Slater 2000:12, 36). Suttons (2004) ethnographic study shows how cheaper, easier, and faster travel enables large-scale family reunion parties among Afro-Caribbean migrants, assembling in one signicant Caribbean place dispersed family members from most North Atlantic countries. At many gatherings, family members living abroad will outnumber Caribbean-based members. Mason (2004) demonstrates how English people with Pakistani ancestors regularly visit Pakistan to be copresent with their kin, to keep their family networks alive. Three-fths of journeys undertaken by Korean-New Zealanders are to Korea, followed by journeys to Australia and Japan, where many Korean-New Zealanders have kin members (Kang and Page 2000:57). Moreover, the social obligations implicated within diasporic cultures are often intricately intertwined with obligations to visit specic places, especially monuments, religious sites, and places of cultural victory or loss. Duvals (2004a, 2004b) research on return visits among Caribbean migrants provides good examples of how parents of Caribbean origin feel obliged to keep in touch with their homeland and to introduce its key features personally to their children. The compulsion to proximity is central to family holidays. Brenholdt et al (2004) highlight how most tourists bring their own bodies and their loved ones when they are on holiday. They not only encounter other bodies and places but also travel with signicant others. Places are valued for their ability to afford intimate proximities. Thus: [T]ourists are not merely searching for authenticity of the Other. They also search the authenticity of, and between, themselves (Wang 1999:364). Holidays render the family members available and present to each other. They are together, not separated by work, commuting trips, schools, homework, leisure activities, and the like. Here families invest much work in staging and enacting happy social lifesomething especially shown through their performances for the camera (Haldrup and Larsen 2003; Larsen 2005). It also seems that tourism even to typical tourist places can often involve visiting friends and family. Kyle and Chicks (2004) ethnography of an American fair demonstrates how families repeatedly return to the fair because it turned into a meeting place where tourists maintain precious relationships with family members and friends living elsewhere. In a similar fashion, Caletrios study of Spanish tourists in Costa Blanca shows that many are repeaters who have established strong relationships with others doing the same. Such people, one might say, are engaged in dwelling-in-tourism (Pons 2003). Therefore, much tourism involves a particular combination of places and signicant people; many tourists take a trip with signicant others (unlike solitary business tourists), and they might visit or meet up with friends or kin. Few see the world through a solitary romantic gaze or travel the world as a single aneur without an intended destination. Europeans travel to see their parents in their old hometown or their migrated parents in Spain or their best friend now living in Beijing or an old university friend now lecturing in Calcutta or their daughter studying in Toronto. As such, when tourists visit friends or kin they

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simultaneously travel to particular places that are experienced through the hosts social networks and their accumulated knowledge of the local scene or of pertinent landscapes. Thus, sociality matters in sightseeing, and places matter in visiting people. A further topic for research would be whether places seen through the eyes of local hosting residents are viewed differently from where places are encountered through guidebooks and websites. Researching Networks and Tourism The signicance of these distant connections and tourism to visit signicant others and to fulll social obligations are striking in the research conducted with a purposive sample of 24 youngish (under 38 years of age) architects; sales managers, personal trainers, and receptionists in health and tness clubs; and security doormen and porters. This research explores to what degree social networks are geographically stretched out and what the consequences are of this stretching for peoples social life and their likely future tourism patterns. The focus is upon these three occupations/industries because they are expanding (and likely to continue to do so), and they signicantly differ with regard to education, salary/status and, it is hypothesized, mobility patterns (Larsen et al 2006a, 2006b, 2006c). In 2004, these youngish people made on average 2.4 international leisure journeys and almost 10 UK leisure journeys of more than 100 miles, while the average number of business trips were 0.2 and 2.4, respectively. Out of the 24 people, 19 traveled abroad for leisure at least once during that year, while only two went on an international business trip. That is, they travel more for life than for a living. There are also some disparities among them. The three who made most long distance journeys in 2004 undertook 27, 25, and 10 trips, while six made only one or none (the gures are not straightforwardly proportional with income). Why, then, do these people travel so much for leisure? Around half of their international journeys involve visiting other places without other connections or obligations, while seeing signicant others (and attending weddings, stag nights, funerals, and reunions) accounts for around one third of their overseas journeys. The remaining quarter of trips abroad are a hybrid with visiting places and meeting going hand in hand. As one respondent reported,
Its usually a combination. Obviously with the cost of traveling and the cost of staying somewhere, if we can make the best out of the trip, the better. So if we can get in doing the tourist thing, doing the relaxation thing and doing the family thing all in one go, then thats convenient bonus. If my friends in Berlin, then thats great because Ive never been to Berlin before so Im killing two birds with one stone. Im looking forward to Berlin (male sales adviser in tness and health club, late 20s).

Another way of killing two birds with one stone is by scheduling a business meeting on a Friday so that it can be continued as a weekend

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break: Im canny basically on this. If I can, Ill nd a reason to be down in London and I can get a ticket off work. Its an open ticket so I can use it whenever. . .. So I can sort of like arrange a meeting on Friday, sorted (male architect, early 30s). Another male architect gives a specic example:
The last [holiday]. . .. was my mums 60th birthday . . . we really couldnt afford it but we were keen to make it a special birthday for her so we got cheap ights . . . So we went to Rome for 3 or 4 days . . . I mean family is very important to me, and the year before it was my dads 70th birthday so we went to Prague with him and we kind of felt we really had to do something for my mum as well for her 60th . . . my sister, who didnt come, did contribute towards the price of the ights and things like that (male architect, early 30s).

One female personal trainer explains how she and her partner invited her parents to Las Vegas to see the singer Celine Dion on their 35th wedding anniversary:
My mum and dad are big fans of Celine Dion . . . It was actually their 35th wedding anniversary and it was kind of a Christmas present, anniversary present, and birthday present all rolled into one; just a very nice treat. Even when we went to see Celine Dion we got superb tickets. We were 5 rows from the front and we could see everything. And she could see us and we could see her and it was just amazing (female personal trainer, early 30s).

These offspring thus demonstrate their love for their parents by giving them a special holiday. The somewhat obligatory nature of the holiday to Rome is shown by how it takes place despite a lack of money and the need for the absent sisters nancial contribution. These gifts are more than the tickets; they represent a desire for being with their parents and having quality time, for experiencing the places and events together as a family. The concert in Las Vegas offers proximity to a famous star and also to each of the family members; it evaporates the 40 or more miles that separate their homes and prevent them being copresent at home as they would otherwise like. Thus, VFR tourism is distinct in that it requires more than just economic capital. It also needs far-ung friends or family members who offer hospitality. Distant connections occasionally enable people with modest incomes to travel further and more frequently than their income would otherwise allow. As a male porter with a rich uncle in San Francisco says:
I have been to San Francisco twice [within the last couple of years] . . . he said oh you must come . . . The company that my uncle was working for, he got all these air miles . . . I stayed at my uncles place . . . Yeah, hes always got things planned, like well go and watch a baseball or basketball game. Hes always got tickets there waiting for us, so its quite cheap when we get there (male porter, mid-20s).

This is one example of how VFR tourism involves sightseeing and events and yet is also network strengthening. Others describe how they go abroad more often now that their parents have a villa in Spain or

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France. The lure of free accommodation means that people living in interesting places are especially likely to receive guests (sometimes against their will):
Im organizing a trip to Mexico because I know hes [friend] only there for another year, so theres no point on missing out on free accommodation . . . You know, say it was somewhere like Azerbaijan, I dont think I would be that keen on going, but you know Mexico, Id quite like to go there (male architect, late 20s).

This example illustrates how some VFR tourism might actually on occasions be damaging to social relationships because it takes place because of the place and the free accommodation and not because of the relationship. Obligations of hosting can be a trying experience. International tourism to see signicant others is thus relatively widespread among all groups with most having friends or family living abroad. On average, the respondents each have friends in two foreign places. The three migrants have friends back home; several of the university graduates made friendships while studying abroad or with exchange students; others again meet friends when working or traveling abroad. Half of the sample has one or more close kin living abroad, and everyone had visited at least one of these family members within the last couple of years. International tourism to see friends and relatives is particularly signicant to migrants to the United Kingdom. The Irish male architect returned to Ireland three times in 2004. On each occasion he toured various places to see friends, family members, and the national rugby team playing crucial games, thus combining obligations to signicant people and live events. As such, timing was crucial on these trips. For the doorman and his family who had lived 25 years in South Africa before returning to England, annual holidays to South Africa are thought of as essential, even though they are expensive and prevent them from touring other places. It was very important to return home to stay in contact with, and introduce his daughter to, their family as well as to the nature of South Africa. These visits also enable him to reunite with friends living in Cape Town, elsewhere in United Kingdom, and Europe, as his transnational circle of friends and their families coordinate their holidays so that they visit Cape Town at the same time. He also explained how the last time that his family-in-law came to visit them in the United Kingdom was straight after they had their rst baby. The parents stayed for three months to help out with the baby and to provide general support. Obligations and caring were also part of the reason why the architect from Russia had to travel home three times in 2004:
I was there in December and at New Year, then I was there . . . at the beginning of summer to my best friends wedding and then my granddad passed away so I went only 3 weeks after that . . . My mum phoned me in the evening, I was in the ofce. I stayed in the ofce overnight just to nish off things, and booked ights rst thing in the morning, called a taxi, called for passport and I was in Russia in about. . .I dont know, less than a day after she phoned. He lived with us for 17 years. I

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really had to be there. I went for a week and then I went in December againfor Christmas (female architect, early 30s).

This example illustrates how intimate networks of care, support, and affection can be traced over geographical distance, as scholars of kinship and migration have long described. This architect speaks with her mother in Russia every Saturday morning for an hour or so, and she is in more or less daily email contact with her brother in Russia who needs her help with various issues. While caring at-a-distance works in most cases, the death of her granddad means that she really has to be there, to care in proximity with the rest of family. She has to care in a much more embodied and social way than is permitted by phone calls and emails. Timing is everything; this woman has to be on time for the funeral, and thus she is in an acute rush to fulll her work obligations and arrange the journey. This example illustrates how exible and efcient coordination and tourism depend upon access to, and skilful use of, phone, mobile, the Internet, email, and webpages, as well as the nancial means to buy last-minute tickets and to take a taxi. Trips abroad to catch up with friends in the United Kingdom are common. Long work hours, and commitments to partners and dispersed social networks make it difcult for friends to spontaneously meet up at the same time, so meetings have to be coordinated in advance and tourism brings networks together:
My friends from back home in Chester, everyone does their own thing. Its quite difcult to all meet up at the same time. Weve all got like our partners and things like that, and our partners arent really from the same area so they dont really know each other very well. Quite often, if we are going to meet up, we try and go away or something together (male sales advisor in tness and health club, late 20s).

A male architectwho has studied and worked in various places throughout United Kingdomexplains how a recent stag night to Prague might turn out to be an annual reunion:
. . .basically it was a circle of friends who Ive known since I was at sixth form, college and university . . . Its very very rare that were all in the same spot at any one time, all of us together, so theres been a lot of talk about arranging it as a yearly thing because it is so rare that everyone can meet up for personal reasons, some have got family, married or live far away or you know work commitments. It seems like a really good excuse just too sort of say this year were going to Berlin for 3 or 4 days (male architect, early 30s).

He also talks about how he goes snowboarding once or twice a year and how these trips are important social events where people catch up with old friends and friends of friends, and meet new people as new faces join this revolving snowboard network stretching across United Kingdom and Europe. On the last trip to Canada there were 12 of us . . . people in Glasgow and Aberdeen . . . people in London . . . right down to people in East Grinstead and Surrey and stuff like that. Im sort of in the middle (male architect, early 30s). These meetings often

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take place at very specic timed events. One respondent notes with regard to weddings:
A problem I have . . . I nd a lot of my holidays have been taken up with going to weddings and going to stag dos. This year Ive got 7 weddings to go to . . . Im going to have to take out a mortgage (male architect, late 20s).

Fullling these obligations through tourism will often be costly. This also means that mobile social networks may in effect exclude those who would otherwise meet up if less travel, or less expensive travel, were required. In the quote above, a male architect expresses his nancial concern over the many weddings and stag nights that he has to attend. Reecting that the average age of the interviewees was 28.5, weddings, stag nights, hen nights, and honeymoons trigger much tourism. The interviews reveal that stag nights in what are thought to be vibrant places for this age group, such as Berlin, Amsterdam, and Prague, are now common. Low-cost airlines can assemble dispersed social networks in such places at a cost that is little more than the cost of meeting up within the United Kingdom. Most respondents agree that it is more or less obligatory to attend stag nights and especially the weddings of important friends and family members, even if it requires substantial travel:
With weddings, its a big thing, isnt it? You only get married once, so if its a close friend you denitely feel obligated . . . I cant think of one invite weve turned down. Weve probably been to about three or four and weve got about ve or six over the next two years to go to. All over the place . . . you would just have to go wherever they are really. Like I say if its in France or Greece or whatever (male architect, late 20s).

Weddings faraway mobilize otherwise immobile people and bring together friends and family members who seldom meet because distance separates them. The female personal trainer and her partner are particularly touched that her two American friends that she talks with once a week on the phone but hardly ever sees, will come to her wedding, especially because one of them: . . . has never been out of the United States. And to turn round and say Im making the effort to your wedding, and she doesnt like ying either . . . and its going to 910 hours . . . I think to myself WOW (female personal trainer, early 30s). After the wedding, she is taking the Americans on a guided tour of London in order to demonstrate her appreciation that they made the long journey and were there at her wedding. The obligatory nature of weddings creates dilemmas if they clash with other obligations. As one dedicated Liverpool soccer fan reects:
I have a record of not missing a match for about 10 years at home . . . this year my partners cousin is getting married in April [on a Saturday] and [perhaps] it clashes with a home match . . . her auntie has invited everyone round to her house for a get together the day after the wedding . . . Im not going to miss the wedding, I cant miss the wedding . . . but if Liverpool are playing on Sunday then I will be

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tempted to come up on my own to watch the match because I dont feel its quite as important, but again that will really be frowned upon, so. . .. (male architect, early 30s).

Not fullling social obligations can have signicant consequences; in this example, the architect will be really frowned upon if he fulls his obligations to his close Liverpool soccer friends rather than to the wedding. Obligations are thus not xed in time and space, but are negotiated, contested, and enforced. Moral work is often required to remind people of their obligations. As one person says about the surprisingly big turn out for his wedding in Spain, I think my father probably put a lot of pressure on his brothers and sisters, my aunties and uncles, to come over from Ireland, because they were all there (male architect, early 30s). Perhaps this pressure was needed because none of the family members have connections with Spain. The couple got married there because they wanted it to be special, and this was possible because they have wealthy friends who have retired to a well-known tourist spot:
So I was talking to a couple of friends of ours who . . . . . theyre retirement age, 65, quite wealthy and theyd just bought a house over in Spain, a villa, a holiday home. And I was telling them my predicament. I said we just dont know what to do . . . We just want to go and get married somewhere. So they said why dont you get married near the villa in Spain? (male architect, early 30s).

During the wedding preparations this couple traveled four times to Spain, where they also enjoyed the hospitality of their friends. This illustrates yet again how connections at-a-distance afford possibilities for extensive mobile lifestyles. Many of these meetings with friends and family take place on weekends. One respondent explained, Normally about three nights. We dont normally go down for two nights. Longer than three nights you start getting in each others way (male doorman, early 30s). Such tourism is of relatively short duration because it takes place in private homes (with perhaps too little space for extra people) and through non-commercialized hospitality; it requires substantial domestic work and guiding to host friends. The car is crucial here for this extended pattern of life:
I was discussing with my wife last week that it would be horrible not having a car because of the weekends. We dont use the car during the week very much. When its local we cycle. Then at the weekends its fantastic. It means its achievable (male architect, mid-20s).

Weekend trips by car are thought to be both cheaper (partly because couples rarely travel alone) and more exible. As an architect argues,
Im always [traveling] with my wife and if theres two people in a car its always the cheapest I nd. I think the trains very expensive. Probably the main reason is the convenience because you have your own timetable, you can go when you want to, you can come back and you can go exactly where you need to be. And often we use the car when we get to the destination (male architect, early 30s).

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Cars afford exibility with regard to route and time schedule (Urry 2004). This is desirable because weekend trips normally involve visiting people located in different places within a short period. Because of their distant connections, respondents made 10 long distance journeys in the United Kingdom in 2004. Only three do not have friends in English towns or cities more than 100 miles away. Nine travel for more 100 miles to meet with their parents or sisters or brothers. While they see their local ties more often, connections to distant family members and friends are sustained by phone calls or text messages or emails, but especially through regular face-to-face visits. Such tourism to see friends and relatives is particularly widespread among those who have been educated at university. One Liverpoolbased respondent, who grew up in Warwick and went to university in Plymouth and Liverpool, reects upon why he spends many hours on the road every second week:
I think its because I now live in Liverpool and my family and my school friends are still back in Warwick, and I went to university in Plymouth so Ive got friends from Plymouth, and then Ive got friends in London . . . Some people I know in London were school friends, some people were at university in Liverpool, some people were at university in Plymouth, and theyve gone to London (architect, mid-20s).

This explanation is actually incomplete since many of his journeys result from his partners equally stretched out social network. As he says, Well last weekend I drove down to High Wycombe near London. My wifes grandmother is ill, we think she will die soon so we went to visit her. Indeed the interviews reveal how tourism is rarely an isolated decision pursued by individual agents, but a collective action involving friends, family members, partners, and their friends and family members. When people talked about where they travel and why, they talked about complex relationships with (two sets of) family and friends. Their accounts are highly relational. People are enmeshed in social dramas wherein tourism depends upon negotiation, approval, and feelings, with social and emotional consequences. The fact that many family events are more or less obligatory begins to explain how tourism has little to do with simple personal choice:
. . .[my partners] family are very rigid in the fact that there are certain days of the year like Easter, Boxing Day where its a kind of compulsory family get together, so you have to make that effort to go down there. Your absence would be noted if you werent there. (male architect, early 30s).

For many people, being in a relationship means traveling a lot since they are likely to have two sets of parents, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, grandparents, as well as friends. This indicates that one cannot understand tourism if the individual is taken as the unit of analysis. Individuals are enmeshed in networks that both enable and constrain possible individual actions. These complex networks mean that weekend touring can be especially stressful:

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. . .weve got different groups of friends, her friends and my friends, who live in London. And I actually hate going to London because weve got so many friends that are down there, so when you go down there you feel you have to try and see everyone, and at the end you come back on the Sunday and you wish you had another couple of days off. It just never feels like a weekend when you go down there. And there will always be arguments because someone will nd out that youve been down to London but you purposely havent told them because you know you cant t them in (male architect, late-20s).

This brings out how such visiting and hosting is effectively networking, sometimes enjoyable and stimulating, sometimes tedious and tiring. Social life at-a-distance and tourism is certainly not cost-free. CONCLUSION This article has explored various transformations of tourism through an analysis of the stretching out of peoples social networks resulting from time-space compressing technologies and the mobilities of labor markets, higher education, family life, migration, and diasporic trips. While communicative tourism is crucial to dispersed social networks, its substitution effect upon corporeal forms is so far small, in part because it connects far-ung networks within places of intermittent copresence. This makes tourism seem essential for many in such a networked world. Thus as one respondent claimed:
[Travel] is essential. I dont think we could go on just by making emails and phone calls. It is very necessary for us to go and see friends and family . . . I think it would be emotionally bad for us if we didnt. We need to travel (male sales advisor in tness and health club, late-20s).

Thus, it is necessary to de-exoticize tourism theory. Tourists may not search for lost authenticity (MacCannell 1976) but on occasions at least seek for distant connections. Whereas MacCannell believed that the tourist quest for authenticity was doomed to fail, connecting people through tourism may be more effective at producing authentic experiences. Tourism is not merely an isolated exotic island but often also a signicant set of social and material relations. This study shows how these relations connect and reconnect disconnected people in intermittent face-to-face proximities. Obligations and pleasures can go hand in hand. Thus whereas sightseeing used to be a tting basis for theory, networking is now also an illuminating concept, although not intended to replace the other. There are a number of key elements about this networking approach. First, networking highlights how tourism is a social practice that involves embodied work, of scheduling, traveling, visiting, guiding, hosting, cleaning, and so on. In other words this function is in part work. Second, tourism patterns are relational and embedded within social networks and their obligations; they are not free-oating and unrelated to everyday patterns of social life, family, and friendship. Tourists are increasingly to be found in everyday places

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and are for once literally off the beaten track. Third, tourism involves networking tools such as email, mobile phones, webpages, and access to cars, trains, and planes. The concept of network capital relevant here may mean that tourism can generate and sustain social capital through facilitating richer and more interdependent patterns of sociability (Larsen et al 2006b, 2006c). Fourth, tourists should be seen as producers of social relations as much as they are passive consumers; and this relates more generally to the so-called performance turn within tourism studies. Finally, places will be very variably experienced through being visited through these different modalities, as a place of sightseeing, re-meeting friends, family encounters, professional/business meetings, meeting at specic events, and more. Therefore, what is important for future research is deciphering the interconnections among place, events, and sociabilities, where experiences of place are complexly multifaceted. These interconnections set out a new agenda so as to examine the multiple ways in which places and performances are elaborately intertwined. In this new conguration, networking is one of the new modalities through which places are seen as desirable sites for being visited and revisited. This article suggests that the analysis of obligations, social networks at-a-distance, and social capital should be central to 21st century tourism analysis. If this is correct about the power of social networks to engender obligations to be face-to-face, especially within places otherwise distant, then making tourism environmentally sustainable is even more of a challenge. Given the exceptionally distributed character of many peoples important social network connections, and presuming people do not live lives entirely on the screen, then places are going to be physically traveled to for a long while yet, especially to connect with known others living at a distance.
AcknowledgementsThis research was generously funded by the UK Department for Transport. However, the agency is not responsible for the material or arguments presented here.

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Submitted 19 October 2005. Resubmitted 6 March 2006. Resubmitted 28 April 2006. Resubmitted 18 May 2006. Final version 18 May 2006. Accepted 24 July 2006. Refereed anonymously. Coordinating Editor: Dean MacCannell