The spaces we travel in have been morphing into some very strange shapes. Take air travel. Sometimes, it feels more like you're in a shop, a cinema or a business executives' telecommuting club than travelling thousands of feet above the clouds.

No-frills air travel seems particularly streamlined into a space for hyperconsumption. Scarcely have the fasten-seat-belts lights gone out than the trolleys parade down the aisles, and shoppers are meant to purchase everything from in-flight snacks to eau de toilette.

More startling is the cabin crew's grim determination to sell as much as possible by the time the plane has landed. It is more like a high-flying supermarket than the traditional, far more physical and immersive experience of flying.

Or take the way glossy ads portray being in a car. "Pioneer sound - vision - soul" announces one headline. The page is an interior shot of a car, somewhere between the driver's and passenger seats. Outside is a quiet street scene; only three cars are visible on a road that curves through verdant parklands.

Central to the advert is a screen on the dashboard, showing a map with street names: rue de la Couture, boulevard Clemenceau. Above the gadget is the slogan: "If you can't see the advantages of Driver's View, get lost."

This is the DVD Cyber Navi, where "in-car navigation gets you a whole new perspective". It "features all of Europe on one DVD" - even the EU hasn't managed that yet - and offers a "driver's view that is streets ahead, and when you're out on the road, isn't that just where you want to be?" So you're no longer in your immediate surroundings but "streets ahead" of them.

A companion advertisement promotes Pioneer's "in-car DVD entertainment system". It eliminates all exterior vistas in favour of a back-seat view of a small screen, which is mounted on the headrest of the front seat. It's showing a cartoon, and in the seat pocket are some headphones and a carton of popcorn. The tag line reads: "The back seat of the car's never been so entertaining. Well, almost."

Or take a two-page colour spread for the Ford Galaxy multimedia system. The first page shows a car on an open road against a coastal landscape, with the slogan "Kids on board". On the second, we're inside the car, with a close-up of a boy watching Thunderbirds on another headrest-mounted screen. Mum sits in front, smiling contentedly. Here the slogan puns: "Kids not bored."

Although not in vision, the assumed father of this nuclear happy family is, apparently, in the driver's seat - the invisible navigator while the rest of the family are caught up in multimedia technology, shrinking the space and time of their journey. The wonders of travel are reduced to saving a console generation from boredom.

It wasn't always like this. In the 19th century, bicycles, steamships, trains, escalators, elevators and, eventually, cars and planes transformed our relationship between vision and movement and the way we experienced distance and time. Central for the traveller were the views and glimpses of people and landscapes, visible through the windows of the coach, train or steamship, linking movement and spectacle.

But these 21st-century adverts point in a different direction. Instead of views out of the windows, they shape and order the interior space, enclosing the children in the tamed and domesticated world of the small screen. For the driver, instead of looking out and enjoying the surroundings, the emphasis is on direct transportation from A to B - "you can voice or text your destination."

In the ad world, the car's interior space eliminates intrusions from the exterior world. Something has been curiously inverted along the way: travel and movement now involve a deferral or displacement of the immediate external experience.

Despite the apparently tough, rebellious tone of the advertising slogans - "get lost" - and their claims of a new perspective or entertainment on the move, paradoxically, they close off the world of adventure and travel. They collapse movement, speed, time and spectacle into a series of precast, enclosed, push-button electronic mappings.

In these parallel universes, the in-car and in-flight entertainment systems battle with the time-space aspects of travel, masking movement across cities at night, the different landscapes with their patchwork shapes. Instead, they press us into an encapsuled world of packaged consumables and the fictional cyberspaces of a global entertainment machine.