Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
be nothing but transparent heaps of jelly to each other” fretted a London
writer in 1897 (quoted in Marvin 1988:68). For many, the telephone repre-
sented the self-su
cient bourgeois family under attack. Although Meyrowitz
(1985) famously argued that electronic communications leveled social hier-
archies, a politically more realistic view of this process indicates that simply
expanding the opportunities for interaction rarely achieves this outcome.
Rather, telephones unleashed complex and contradictory social impacts,
summarized in the “delocalization debate,” in which one view held that, like
the automobile, the telephone accelerated the individualism, social with-
drawal, and disengagement from public life so widespread in American soci-
ety, while the opposing view maintained that telephones allowed additional
convenient contacts, especially for the isolated and lonely (e.g., in rural areas),
furthering the formation of “communities without propinquity,” that is,
telephones complemented, not substituted for, face-to-face interaction.
Capturing relative space in
flux through the arts and music
Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art, music, and literature all
acted as registers of the multiple, enormous changes in the social construction
of time and space then rapidly unfolding. For example, the invention of
photography, or “light writing,” in the form of daguerreotypes in 1839 ushered
in a new age of representation and visual experience. In 1888, George East-
man's mass-produced Kodak camera made its appearance, and large num-
bers of people took to the art with gusto. The photograph became almost
universally accepted as an accurate, unbiased, straightforward mirror of the
world, one with the power to capture the
fl
fidelity of visual experience, to re-
present the past faithfully (Sontag 1977). Few technologies would validate
the ocularcentrism of Enlightenment modernity so completely, producing
“a frozen, disincarnated gaze on a scene completely external to itself” (Jay
1993:127). Schivelbusch (1977:63) writes that in contrast to the railroad,
which annihilated intimate observation, “The intensive experience of the
sensuous world, terminated by the Industrial Revolution, underwent a resur-
rection in the new institution of photography.” Modernist interpretations
assumed photography to be unproblematic; as Lutz and Collins (1993:28)
wrote, “The photographer's intent, the photographic product, and the reader's
experience were assumed to be one. For this reason, photographs, unlike
other cultural texts, were held to be readable by even the simplest among us.”
Thus photography was viewed as being a direct, unmediated re
fi
ection of
objective reality, and the photographer's intent was held to be nonexistent or
unimportant.
While the content of the photograph appeared self-evident, its context
and meaning required interpretation. Almost immediately, the capacity of
photographers to manipulate and retouch images began to undermine the
taken-for-granted capacity of the camera to re
fl
ect reality objectively. Snyder
(1980:505) points out that “our vision is not formed within a rectangular
fl
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