Communications, Geography of

Spatial Flows and Structures

Interest in the spatial organization of communication flows and infrastructure arose during the 1960s as geographers turned to physics for the keys to understanding geographic patterns. Spatial analysts used distance decay models, analogous to models of gravitic attraction, to predict interaction between places. Rather than distance, the more sophisticated models were based on accessibility. These models generally neglected the ability of people to act at a distance through communication media, but a handful of geographers, including Ronald Abler, Donald Janelle, and Peter Gould, gave special attention to communications. An important idea to emerge from their scholarship was the dynamic changeable quality of space when viewed in terms of accessibility. The best-known aspect of this research is the concept of time–space convergence, the progressive reduction in the time required to access one location from another location. Janelle showed that time–space compresses or converges due to a combination of technological innovation and economic competition, with each encouraging the other. The end point of such convergence—absolute or complete time–space convergence—was of particular interest. In such a situation, distance presumably would no longer affect the interaction between two points. Although complete time–space convergence was only a theoretical limit in transportation studies, it already existed in practical terms for communications by the 1970s due to technological innovations such as radio, television, and the telephone. Spatial analysts who studied communication needed to develop theories in which distance was replaced by other space-shaping factors such as perceptions and policies. Janelle also introduced the idea of personal extensibility, that is, the ability of an individual to access distant points.

These ideas of accessibility, extensibility, and spatial metamorphosis were subsequently revisited during the 1990s in light of the diffusion of networked computers and other information technologies. Cultural geographers, urban geographers, political geographers, and economic geographers all contributed to this emerging topic of interest, arguing that the space created by instantaneous communication was not as simple as early observers had expected. Late-20th-century communications had given rise to both centralization and decentralization at the same time. Economic, political, and administrative power became centralized in a small number of technological growth poles, including world cities and cyberstates, even as many jobs were decentralizing to sprawling suburbs with back offices and farther afield to maquiladora factories and overseas sweatshops. Both centralization and decentralization resulted from a new integration of production, sales, [Page 51]administration, and distribution over long distances with virtually no delays involved in access via communication technologies.

This process brought the world under increasing control by world cities or, more precisely, by well-connected elites in world cities. Manuel Castells described the situation in terms of a “space of flows”—a digital context of interaction absorbing and suppressing the older “space of places” where people live, work, and struggle to achieve security. Castells's model was subsequently modified to acknowledge local variations in the understanding and appropriation of communication technologies. Technologies are understood to be socially constructed; their ubiquity does not mean that their adoption occurs in the same way in every place. First, places vary tremendously in their degrees of access to the new communication devices. Second, even where the access to communication devices is equally high, the particular mix of media uses varies due to differences in pricing, regulation, and taxation. Third, the uses of a communication device vary from place to place, so the same device may be understood in one community as an adjunct to marketing and sales even while it is understood in another community as a forum for interpersonal communication. Therefore, the absolute time–space convergence produced by new media is far from rendering space and place irrelevant.

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