Mobility Pioneers Networks, scapes and flows between first and second modernity (Discussion paper for the Alternative Mobilities Futures conference,

research question is how so called mobility pioneers from the IT branch, the media industry and the German armed forces socially construct their mobility in relation to social, material and virtual worlds. What we want to know is how mobility pioneers are embedded or dis-embedded in or from social, material and virtual networks. We ask how these networks influence, support and limit the actors ' mobility, i.e. their competence to realize own projects and plans while being on the move. Mobility, we suppose, is a social concept in transformation. The modern notion of mobility is strongly entangled with the idea that spatial (e.g. physical) movement is a major dynamic factor of modernization (Zorn 1977, Zapf 1993, 1998). We want to investigate if the importance of physical movement for the social construction of (modern) mobility is getting weaker. We ask: could it be that virtual mobility will be the paradigmatic and socially shaping concept for “Alternative Mobility Futures”? In order to indicate a trace of an answer to these complex questions this paper shows the specific project approach to empirical data and interpretation. It gives a short introduction into the theoretical framework and demonstrates why a subtl