Television and Geography

Over the past two decades, human geographers have taken an increasing critical interest in the mass media. This development reflects the growing recognition that the media are centrally implicated in both (a) the constitution, experience, and representation of space, place, landscape, and environment (in short, geography) and (b) the mechanisms by which geography in its various incarnations, in turn, is implicated in social processes. Of all the mass media, television is seen as perhaps centrally important in these regards; for, despite the rapid growth in penetration and usage of the Internet and notwithstanding the ongoing cultural, economic, and political significance of newspapers, magazines, and radio, it is widely believed that for the bulk of the world's population, television is the most socially material mass medium.

Geographers have studied television's social role from a large number of different angles, which can usefully be grouped into three categories, and it is around these three categories that this entry is organized. The first category is geographies on television—in other words, the ways in which geography (i.e., space, place, landscape, [Page 2791]and environment) is represented in television programming. The second category is geographies of television: what significant geographical patterns and processes can be identified in the organization of television itself as both an industry (which produces and distributes programming) and a technology (through which people receive and watch such programming). The final category is harder to define but can perhaps best be described as the myriad ways in which television shapes and reshapes the fundamental experience of space and place and of spatially mediated identities.