Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Third, time-space compression does not necessarily occur in short, sudden,
dramatic, and sweeping changes. Although some historical moments have
been truly revolutionary in terms of their impacts on time and space, often
the restructuring of these two dimensions occurred more gradually. Stein
(2001), for example, drawing upon guides to steamship services in nineteenth-
century Cornwall, Ontario, notes that steamboats reduced the time necessary
for the trip from Montreal to Kingston from 26 to 24 hours between 1850 and
1853, a savings of only a few minutes per year. Time-space compression is
frequently gradual and cumulative, evolutionary, not necessarily revolution-
ary, or, in the words of May and Thrift (2001:18), it “occurred less rapidly
and more unevenly than is often suggested,” comments that serve to warn
us against exaggerating the impacts of new technologies and social and
spatial forms.
Fourth and
finally, time-space compression is not simply a material pro-
cess, but also a symbolic and discursive one. Poststructural theory, in empha-
sizing the centrality of language and representation as means by which the
world is made present, extends the understanding of time-space compression
into the domains of the discursive and imaginative. Geographical imagin-
ations are mechanisms by which societies and individuals construct perceived
relational spaces of distance and proximity de
fi
ned more by cultural rather
than physical distances. The act of Othering, for example, involves the con-
struction of cultural distances between “us” and “them” that may or may not
be proportionate to spatial distances. Changes in relational distances are
therefore intimately bound up with changes in individual and social identities
(Pile and Thrift 1995). In this sense, the analysis of time-space compression
can learn much from, and contribute to, the literatures and understandings
of Orientalism and postcolonialism (Said 1978; Gregory 1995). One such
example is the collisions of cultures that colonialism and imperialism entailed,
including, among other things, the intersections of very di
fi
ff
erent geographical
imaginations.
There is no single theorization that can explain time-space compression in
all of its diverse historical and spatial contexts: rather, it took di
ff
erent forms,
exhibited di
erent
consequences, depending on where and when it occurred and who was
involved. Rather than attempt to form one overarching theory of timespace,
May and Thrift (2001) propose that we accept the multiplicity of timespaces
characteristic of every society: “Thus, the picture that emerges is less that of a
singular or uniform social time stretching over a uniform space, than of
various (and uneven) networks of time stretching in di
ff
erent patterns, re
fl
ected di
ff
erent causes, and implied di
ff
ff
erent and divergent
directions across an uneven social
field” (p. 5). In the spirit of poststructural-
ist inquiry, therefore, this project rejects the search for an overarching, all-
encompassing explanatory dynamic, be it technological change or the search
for a spatial
fi
fix, in favor of a more contingent, open-ended approach sensi-
tive to the particularities that accompanied and underpinned time-space
compression in all of its messy complexity.
fi
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