Mobility and Relations in Digitally Saturated Social Worlds

Aija Lulle and Ieva Puzo
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Aija Lulle: Department of Geographical and Historical Studies, University of Eastern Finland, Finland / Faculty of Social Sciences, Riga Stradins University, Latvia
Ieva Puzo: Faculty of Social Sciences, Riga Stradins University, Latvia

Social Inclusion, 2026, vol. 14

Abstract: Social relationships are among the primary means through which people move, belong, and make meaning of the world. The current historical moment of intensified digital infrastructures, platform economies, and evolving artificial intelligence requires renewed conceptual attention to the relationship between mobility and social ties. This thematic issue examines how digitally saturated social worlds reconfigure the conditions under which relationships evolve. Bringing together studies of students, refugees, highly skilled migrants, young men, middle‐aged professionals, diasporic families, teleworkers, healthcare workers, and transnational children, it shows that digital connection is not synonymous with social inclusion. Connectivity may sustain care across distance, enable work and learning, assist language navigation, and generate fleeting solidarities. It may also intensify surveillance, precarity, gendered expectations, professional devaluation, and emotional exhaustion. We argue that social ties in digitally saturated worlds must be understood as relational, infrastructural, and mobile: They stretch across borders, platforms, bodies, institutions, and places, while remaining unevenly shaped by intersections of class, age, gender, race, language, migration status, and digital competence. The thematic issue advances an agenda for researching digital relationality, foregrounding the lived complexity in which platforms and AI mediate mobility, intimacy, care, work, and social inclusion.

Keywords: artificial intelligence; digital devices; digital relationality; encounters; micro‐relational infrastructures; migration; mobility; social relations; social worlds; wearables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:socinc:v14:y:2026:a:12877

DOI: 10.17645/si.12877

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