Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
market-driven imperatives came to dominate. The stable regime of regulation
governing the satellite industry during the post-war boom, dominated by the
International Satellite Organization (Intelsat), gave way to a radically di
er-
ent one in the late twentieth century. Long the world's premier provider of
global satellite services, enjoying almost monopoly status, Intelsat has been
faced with growing competition from national satellite systems erected by
individual nations (e.g., Indonesia, India, Mexico, China, France, Turkey,
and Thailand). A second source of competition came from private satellite
companies. Given the high
ff
fixed costs and barriers to entry into the satellite
industry, particularly launch costs, few private
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firms took early advantage of
the openings provided by deregulation. However, as entry costs declined, the
industry has become steadily commercialized (Achilleas 2002). The rise of
private satellite carriers represents the intrusion of market imperatives in
what had once been a sector aligned purely along the prerogatives of national
security. Finally, the satellite industry as a whole has been besieged by mount-
ing competition from
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fiber optics carriers (Giget 1994; Graham 1999; Warf
2006); due to the higher levels of security they of
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fiber optics are the mode
of choice for large corporations for data and voice transmissions, and by
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ff
er,
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financial institutions for electronic funds transfer systems.
In light of these observations of how satellites and postmodern terrestrial
political economy are shot through with one another, popular notions that
telecommunications annihilate distance and render all places equally access-
ible may be dismissed immediately; despite claims that satellites provide equal
levels of service over vast parts of the world's surface, in practice access to this
technology is highly unevenly distributed among and within countries. In
short, satellites, whether military or corporate, do not simply re
ect the
world's geopolitics, they are simultaneously
constitutive
of it, blurring the
boundaries between earth and space, the global and the local, the public and
the private.
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The snowstorm of pixels: television
With cinema and television, the phenomenon of the mass audience—
fi
rst
created with the printing press—reached its apex. Television became the
rst
medium to stitch together the world as a collage of simultaneous sites and
sounds divorced from their historical or geographical context. In most indus-
trialized countries, the expansion of free time during the post-war boom was
generally used to watch additional hours of television: by the 1960s, televi-
sion had become the dominant use of leisure time in the industrialized West,
and, increasingly, large parts of the developing world. Rising exponentially in
numbers of viewers, television became near-universal, penetrating 98 percent
or more of households in Europe, Japan, and North America. As Adams
(1992:118) observes, “once people are able to acquire a television set, they use
it with similar alacrity whether they live in Des Moines, Iowa or Kragujevac,
Yugoslavia.” As Esslin (1982:54) put it, “Television is the one factor that
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