Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
in size, once-protected local industries lost their monopoly status and were
forced to compete with other producers in neighboring, then increasingly
distant regions. For individuals, the bene
ts of time-space compression
include increasing mobility to a wider horizon of potential destinations.
As the transportation literature demonstrates, mobility levels tend to rise
proportionate to income; however, transport times remain essentially stable,
indicating that the ability to conquer distance is purchased primarily through
increasing velocities. It follows that historically, higher mobility levels have
been associated with increasing standards of living (Zelinsky 1971).
In the 1960s, the shrinking world was a popular theme among technocrats
such as Daniel Bell and Alvin To
fi
er, who approached the topic from the
perspective of “post-industrial” society, the decline of manufacturing, and
the rise of an information-based service class. Bell (1960:22), for example,
contrasted spatial accessibility in 1789, when the Constitution was signed,
with 1960: “The real change of scale between 1789 and today, has to do with
the number of persons each of us knows and the number each of us know
of—in short, the way in which we experience the world.” Technocratic views
of communications were widely promoted by Marshall McLuhan (1962,
1967), whose enormously in
uential works portrayed a progression from the
limited spatiality of preindustrial societies and orality as the dominant form
of communication to the in
fl
uence of printing to the global networks of mod-
ern telecommunications. Each age, he maintained, saw a dramatic increase in
the scale of human extensibility. McLuhan (1964:4) gave particular import-
ance to the electronic media, famously arguing that “the world has become so
compressed and electrically contracted, so that the globe is no more than one
village.” This rosy, utopian view, with its impoverished sense of politics and
inequality, nonetheless spoke to the profound time-space compression that
telecommunications unleashed and decisively entered popular consciousness
on the subject.
Technocratic theorizations of time-space compression, informed primarily
by technological determinism, tended to present space and time as lying out-
side of social relations, and ignored or minimized the social inequalities and
power relations that the process inevitably entails. Because it is fundamentally
an expression of power, time-space compression is always uneven among
groups and places, or, as Adams (1995:268) argues, “One person's (or group's)
time-space compression may depend on another person's (or group's) per-
sistent inability to access distant places.” Increasingly, it became evident to
many observers that absolute notions of space were inadequate to represent
this process accurately, leading to tentative attempts to theorize space in
relational terms. Forer's (1978) early paper on “plastic space,” for example,
stressed the role of di
fl
ff
erent transportation technologies in the folding of
di
erent geographies. An empirical example of relational space is found in
Muller (1984), who describes the non-Euclidean “elastic space” of Canada as
it is stretched by di
ff
erential
surfaces of accessibility. Elucidating the causes and consequences of plastic/
ff
erent types of transport networks, forming di
ff
Search WWH ::
Custom Search