Telecommunications, Geography and

Misconceptions about Telecommunications and Geography

There is considerable confusion about the real and potential impacts of telecommunications, in part due to the long history of exaggerated claims that have been made, particularly by those subscribing to postindustrial theory. Often such views, which are widespread among academics and planners, hinge on a simplistic, utopian technological determinism that ignores the complex, and often contradictory, relations between telecommunications and local economic, social, and political circumstances. For example, proclamations that telecommunications would allow everyone to work at home via telecommuting, dispersing all functions and spelling the obsolescence of cities, have fallen flat in the face of the persistence of growth in dense urbanized places. In fact, telecommunications is generally a poor[Page 478] substitute for face-to-face meetings, the medium through which most sensitive corporate interactions occur, particularly when the information involved is irregular, proprietary, and/or unstandardized in nature. Most managers spend the bulk of their working time engaged in face-to-face contact, and no electronic technology can yet allow for the subtlety and nuances critical to such encounters. For this reason, a century of technological change has left most high-wage, white-collar, administrative command-and-control functions clustered in downtown areas. In contrast, telecommunications is ideally suited for the transmission of routinized standardized forms of data, facilitating the dispersal of functions involved with their processing to low-wage regions. Popular notions that telecommunications will render geography meaningless are simply naive. Although the costs of communications have decreased, other factors have risen in importance, including local regulations, the cost and skills of the local labor force, and infrastructural investments. Economic space, in short, will not evaporate because of the telecommunications revolution.

...