Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
For example, repeated predictions 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 persistent growth in
densely inhabited urbanized places and global cities. In fact, telecommunications
are usually a poor substitute for face-to-face meetings, the medium through which
most sensitive corporate interactions occurs, particularly when the information
involved is irregular, proprietary, and 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. It is true that networks such as the internet allow some professionals to
move into rural areas, where they can conduct most of their business online,
gradually permitting them to escape from their long time reliance on large cities
where they needed face-to-face contact. Yet the full extent to which these systems
facilitate decentralization is often countered by other forces that promote the
centralization of activity. For this reason, a century of telecommunications, from
the telephone to fiber optics, has left most high-wage, white-collar, administrative
command and control functions clustered in downtown areas. In contrast, tele-
communications are ideally suited for the transmission of routinized, standardized
forms of data, facilitating the dispersal of functions involved with their processing
to low-wage regions. In short, there is no particular reason to believe that tele-
communications inevitably lead to the dispersal or deconcentration of functions;
by allowing the decentralization of routinized ones, information technology
actually enhances the comparative advantage of inner cities for nonroutinized,
high-value-added functions that are performed face to face. Thus, telecommuni-
cations facilitate the simultaneous concentration and deconcentration of economic
activities.
Thus, popular notions that ''telecommunications will render geography mean-
ingless'' are simply na. While the costs of communications have decreased, as they
did with transportation, other factors have risen in importance, including local
regulations, the cost and skills of the local labor force, government policies, and
infrastructural investments. Economic space, in short, will not evaporate because
of the telecommunications revolution. Exactly how telecommunications are
deployed is a contingent matter of local circumstances, public policy, and local
niche within the national and world economies.
1.2 The Rise of the Networked Society
One of the most fruitful interpretations of the internet, which avoids technological
determinism, arises from the works of Manuel Castells (
1996
,
1997
), who
famously came up with the notion of the network society. Castells distinguished
earlier information societies, in which productivity was derived from access to
energy and the manipulation of materials, from later informational societies that
emerged in the late 20th century, in which productivity is derived primarily from
