Time-Space Compression

The Concept of time-space Compression

Time-space compression involves the myriad ways in which human beings have attempted to conquer space, to cross distances more rapidly, and to exchange goods and information more efficiently. The analysis of time-space compression places emphasis on the connections and interactions among places (and the people who live within them, for connections are always embodied) rather than on individual places per se. For example, in the simplest sense, using the maximum transportation speed at various historical moments as a measure, the world became 60 times smaller between 1500 and 1970, when we compare the speed of airplanes (say, 600 mph [miles per hour]) with that of medieval sailing vessels (10 mph) (Figure 1). By increasing the velocities of people, goods, and information, the world is made to feel smaller even as interactions are stretched over larger physical distances. The term compression is therefore misleading: Every round of time-space compression involves an expansion in the geographic scale of social activities. This idea is often taken to mean that space ceases to have relevance. Despite the fashionable use of unfortunate expressions such as the “death of distance” or the “annihilation of space,” the fact remains that geography is a stubbornly persistent feature of human life. Rather than the “annihilation of space,” it is healthier to talk of how one space-time regime displaces another. Far from shrinking the world evenly, successive revolutions in the structure of time and space have left it misshapen, as some places were brought together relationally more than others. Moreover, reducing time-space compression to simple reductions in transport times fails to do justice to its deeply phenomenological dimensions and the complexity with which these two dimensions [Page 2841]are wrapped up in social life and their political and ideological origins and associations.

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