The End of Airports

The End of Airports. Does the title mean the end of air travel? Or merely the end result, what feelings and experiences airports produce? Carving a path between these two ends, The End of Airports explores the topic of contemporary air travel from a variety of critical perspectives. It is not necessarily hastening the end of air travel, but seeks to document recurring paradoxes and contradictory sentiments that are ambient around commercial flight and airports. These points of illumination suggest that the epoch of human flight might be coming to a close, or approaching a threshold, as the significance of physical space is ceded to social networks and online worlds. Christopher Schaberg demonstrates how 21st-century airports are strange spaces that coincide and coexist with new media forms. His book is concerned with the ends of airports, or how they function on a normal basis in the contemporary moment. For the word “end” can mean the final part of something (or death), but it can also mean something's object or purpose, or even the point when something begins. We often say “in the end” when we really mean things are ongoing. In this sense The End of Airports is about how airports persist, both in reality and in cultural imaginaries.