A Taxonomy for Communication Geography

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Paul C. AdamsA taxonomy for communication geography

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Article

A taxonomy for communication geography

Paul C. AdamsThe University of Texas at Austin, USA

AbstractWetransmit images of space and place through communication, so space and place are part of the content of media. In addition, every communication follows a path from sender(s) to receiver(s) along a particular spatialroute between particular places. These observations indicate opposing forms of containment: spaces andplaces contain communications yet are also contained by communications. We can accept thesecomplementary views as keys to the organization of the various types of research in communicationgeography. A fifth approach is evident, as well, which transcends the dichotomies of space/place andcontent/context an epistemology that is inherently scaleless.

Keywordsgeography of communication, media infrastructure, performance and place, place image, topologies of communication

I Introduction

Scarcely an issue of any leading geography journal published in the past year can be found that does not contain at least one article referringto communications or media. Most referencesare oblique, as when an article is an attempt todestabilize environmental views promoted bythe media, but some are direct, as in studiesof particular uses of certain media. This interestin mediated communication was not the case inthe late 1990s, when Ken Hillis wrote about theinvisibility of communications in geography(1998). Since that time, an online journal of media geography, Aether , has published severalissues and a specialty group dedicated toCommunicationGeography hasemerged in theAssociation of American Geographers parallel-ing some of the interests of the older Geographyof the Global Information Society commissionin the International Geographical Union. InBritain, despite the absence of an RGS-IBG

study group dedicated to the topic, a phenomenalamount of interest has been directed towardsnew media and communication topics in the past five years. Interest in media is tangentialto the main orientation of many studies, but itlies behind a wide range of concerns such asidentity formation, narrative, scale, dis-courses, publics, and networks. The subdis-ciplines most engaged in studies of media areurban, economic, political, and social geography, as well as studies of gender, mobilities,embodiment, and non-representational theory.

The specific roles of media in these studies arevaried and as such they merit efforts to clarifyand elucidate.

Corresponding author:Department of Geography and the Environment, TheUniversity of Texas at Austin, 1 University StationA3100, Austin, Texas 78712, USAEmail: [email protected]

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Whether in the US, the UK, or elsewhere, thesurge of interest in communications and media is presently quite diverse in goals and objectives.That is to say, not only do communication-related topics come up in various geographicspecializations, but within any of these speciali-zations the questions addressed are quite hetero-geneous. The purpose of this article is to offer ataxonomic system for thinking through some broad delineations of this diverse research, and to suggest there is an order to the way geographers set up theoretical relations between space, place, media and communications. We can start by looking at the precise language that severalscholars use to situate their engagements withmedia and communications:

This paper examines the hegemonic geographicalimaginaries underlying visual and textual represen-tations of border-protected areas, as found in stateand national media, government documents, localnewsletters, and internet sites. (Sundberg and Kaserman, 2007: 729)

[T]his paper demonstrates the enormous amount of tactical work invested in the practice and perfor-

mance of living room interactions with media, notleast in securing access to a medium in the first place, as the teenagers claim their stake in dailyliving. (Tutt, 2008: 2331)

Through the invasive deployment of media machin-ery, media companies like MTV can better captivateemergent structures of feeling and as such better transform the means of cultural production to inten-sify the industrial production of culture. (Rosati,2007: 571)

First, I am interested in mapping and visualizingWi-Fi presence in urban settings. Second, I explorethe underlying infrastructure that supports Wi-Fidata traffic. Third, I study the technical functiona-lity of that infrastructure and its associated cloud of Wi-Fi transmissions. (Torrens, 2008: 62)

Although all of these authors are studyingcontemporary communications from a geo-graphic perspective, each of them approaches

communication geography from a distinctlydifferent angle. Sundberg and Kaserman areinterested in newspaper and television represen-tations of the US-Mexico borderlands, Tutt isinterested in how the telephone becomes theobject of territorial conflicts in the living room,Rosati is interested in MTVs conquest of globalaudiences and Torrens is interested in mappingwireless data transmission infrastructure. In thesefour articles we see two intersecting axes of ten-sion. One of these, the pull between space and place, has been discussed in the geographical lit-erature for decades. The second tension is moreelusive, and arises from contrasting assumptionsregarding (a) the containment of mediated experiences within real, physical contexts of interaction, or (b) the real world as that whichis captured, packaged, and transmitted bymediated contexts of interaction. In other words,we can understand place and space as either the contents of communications or the contextof communications. The studies stake out thecorners of a conceptual space divided into four quadrants: place-in-media (Sundberg and Kaserman), media-in-place (Tutt), space-in-

media (Rosati), and media-in-space (Torrens).The quadripartite scheme is pertinent to manydifferent approaches in geography and useful for indicating the complementarity of variousapproaches that are presently treated as either unrelatedor mutually contradictory. More exam- ples and details are treated elsewhere (Adams,2009) but here I carry the theoretical implica-tions forward by resituating actor-network theory in a boundary zone between space and place and between the content and context-oriented perspectives. My exploration parallelssome excellent recent work in media and communication studies (Couldry and McCarthy,2004; Falkheimer and Jansson, 2006).

My primary purpose is to suggest wide-ranging and theoretically promising affinitiesamong works that currently are presented as hav-ing no potential to speak to each other, or are castas disproving each other. It is also an effort to

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clarify what is meant by communications and media terms which have been obfuscated by sterile debates and a fetishistic obsession withnewness. The term communications has unfor-tunately come to connote electronic and particu-larly digital technologies of communicationwhereas the denotation of the term is in fact much broader. Likewise, media has slid towardsmeaning new material arrangements for commu-nication whereas the term can indicate any com-munication arrangement, old or new, and not justthe material ingredients but also the social ingre-dients (languages, codes, institutions, beliefs,types of knowledge, sources of funding, legalframeworks, etc) that permit that arrangementto mediate. To broaden still further, I use com-munications and media to refer to exchanges, but not necessarily exchanges of informationand not necessarily between humans. Media,as I use it, encompasses arrangements that con-nect one to one, one to many, many to one, and many to many. With this broad net, let us go onto snare a few of the many works that illustratethe two tensions and a stance that attempts totranscend the tensions.

II The tensionsCommunications-related geographic research isdrawn into the four-fold dynamics defined bytwo independent distinctions: space/place and content/context (Adams, 2009). Space and placeform a fundamental opposition at an ontologicallevel, shaping knowledge and experience(Casey, 2001). Place is a focus of care or a center of felt meaning while space is experienced as potentiality, expansiveness, and movement(Tuan, 1974, 1977). Spaces give position and orientation to places; places give character and structure to spaces. Space evokes abstraction,inhumanness, meaninglessness, and emptiness;in contrast, places are often experienced as theessence or foundation of stability, coherence,and particularity (Relph, 1976; Sack, 1980;Harvey, 1996; Cresswell, 2004; Duncan and

Duncan, 2004). Complicating this is theconsensus that analytically and politically weshould conceive of any given place in terms of a particular mix of connections to other places(Massey, 1993) and the recognition that placesare not simply small pieces or subdivisions of space since space itself is given meaning, direc-tionality and proportion by places (Casey, 2001).These poles define the opposing pulls of commu-nication, toward stability on the one hand and movement on the other toward durability ver-sus change, boundedness versus expansiveness.

Not only do communications mediate between space and place, but they do so in waysthat are part of a second dialectic structured bythe tension between communications as contextand communications as contents. Space is wherecommunication happens but is also one of thethings created by communications, and, asCresswell (2004: 15) writes, place is not simplysomething to be observed, researched and written about but is itself part of the way we see,research and write. This paradoxical conditionof mutual containment resists the imposition of hierarchical models and is captured instead by

Dmitri Bondarenkos (2005) concept of heterar-chy. The primary intersections and contrasts areshown in Figure 1.

Henri Lefebvre suggests some of the com- plexity in The Production of Space (1991).First in his scheme are representationalspaces, the spaces of communication lived directly by artists, writers, and philosopherswhich mainly occupy the media-in-placesquadrant. Second are representations of space, which are abstract, theoretical, and production-oriented spaces involving the for-mal plans and abstract blueprints of powerfulactors whose formalizations of space controlactions. These are spaces-in-media. Third comes spatial practice which involves con-crete actions and representations broughttogether in a way that secretes every land-scape and gives it its particularity. Here ele-ments of media-in-places and places-in-media

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are both indicated. Lefebvres framework has been employed in many geographical studies, but is incomplete and somewhat difficult toapply; the structure I propose benefits fromsimplicity. However, it is crucial to avoid essentializing the two binary distinctions, soin addition to four quadrants we will consider a zone between the four poles that define thetwo axes.

III Places-in-mediaGeographical interest in place images emerged in the 1970s with works such as Topophilia(Tuan, 1974), Place and Placelessness (Relph,1976), and Space and Place (Tuan, 1977). Suchworks were inspired by literature, philosophy,and anthropology, and they revealed the intimateties between sense of self, sense of place, and various modes of representation. Cognitive and behavioral psychology inspired other geographers to show how place images supportwayfinding within the city and to study the roleof preferences in spatial decision-making

(Gould and White, 1974; Downs and Stea,1977). As early as the 1970s, Relph critiqued place images in the media, noting that placesreliant on tourism revenues were often madeover so as to appear more and more like their images in the media (Relph, 1976: 92).

Outside geography, critiques of place images became more pointed during the 1960s and 1970s. Literary theory, Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism, as well as semiotics, symbolicconstructionism, and the Frankfurt School,showed place representations as components of discourses involving domination and resistance,marginalization and exclusion, negotiation and evasion (Barthes, 1967, 1972; Berger and Luckman, 1967; Kristeva, 1969; Berger et al.,1972; Gitlin, 1972; Horkheimer and Adorno,1979). The power relations of the place imagewere succinctly captured for geographers in theintroduction to Writing Worlds : [D]iscoursesare both enabling as well as constraining: theydetermine answers to questions, as well as thequestions that can be asked. More generally, adiscourse constitutes the limits within whichideas and practices are considered to be natural;

that is, they set the bounds on what questions areconsidered relevant or even intelligible (Barnesand Duncan, 1992b: 8). The critical approach to place images generated a rich geographical liter-ature in the mid- to late 1980s and early 1990s(Burgess and Gold, 1985; Daniels and Cosgrove,1988; Harvey, 1989; Jackson, 1989; Zonn, 1990;Barnes and Duncan, 1992a; Duncan and Ley,1993; Blunt and Rose, 1994).

Underlying this work was the ontologicalstance of social constructionism originating inthe sociological analysis of language as some-thing that typifies experiences, allowing meto subsume them under broad categories interms of which they have meaning not only tomyself but also to my fellowmen (Berger and Luckmann, 1967: 38). As Mona Domoshargued, this had direct implications in geography since: There is no necessary causal rela-tionship between places and their imaginative

Figure 1. The quadrant diagram demonstrating thedialectics of space/place and content/context. Thenumbers in the quadrants indicate the order inwhich topics are introduced in the body of thispaper.Source: Authors diagram, after Adams (2009: 4)




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forms (Domosh, 1990: 27). Further borrowingsilluminated dynamic interactions between spatialarrangements, perception, knowledge, and social power (Foucault, 1975, 1980, 1988 [1965];Lefebvre, 1991). A primary objectivein this work was to reveal the ways in which place imageswere offered as innocent or politically neutralas well as the strategic manipulation of suchimages. With this critique of geographic repre-sentation came a questioning of aesthetic criteriasuch as beauty and naturalistic criteria such asaccuracy, with both frameworks of judgmentrecast as expressions of power.

To the insights from literary theory, philosophy, and the social sciences regarding represen-tation, geographers added an original argumentregarding the way maps speak a cartographiclanguage no more innocent than any other lan-guage (Harley, 1988, 1992 [1989]; Monmonier,1991; Pickles, 1992; Wood, 1992; Woodward,1992; Herb, 1997). If the map is a place imageamong other placeimages then it also likeother place images is a means of buttressing a partic-ular social hierarchy, including and excludingcertain individuals and groups, and potentially

resisting or evading manifestations of power.Any supposed progress made in cartographicrepresentation, for example through remote sen-sing and GIS, must be assessed in terms of who benefits and who loses as a result of its prolifera-tion (Pickles, 1995, 2004; Schuurman, 2004).

Studies of place images can focus on a partic-ular place (real or imagined), a particular medium (verbal or visual, or both), or on a par-ticular geographical process. A well-researched example of the first approach is the AmericanWest, whichwasalready a myth when Europeansand their descendants set out to conquer it, as boosters glowing accounts projected armchair travelers westwards in mind and in body (Tuan,1977: 174175). Literature, music, art and film peopled the West and gave it a particular moralgeography (Tatum, 1982; Savage, 1994; Delyser,2001; Smith, 2001: 309). Such texts implied aneed for transformation fusion of wilderness

and civilization to form a middle landscape between existential opposites (Shortridge,1989). And like every discourse they had strate-gic silences and erasures which were contested by a few contemporary observers (Morin, 2002).

The studies cited above focus on a particular place image, but place-in-medium studies canalso focus on a particular medium. For example,computer games represent a vision of placewhich disguises and perpetuates the world-view of the author/artist, who in this case is a programmer (Longan, 2008). Their place imagesoften require that the player participates in con-quest, colonization, and government, althoughthey may conversely suggest political resistanceand postcolonial impulses (Breger, 2008).Computer games create contexts for armed con-flict and colonial social relations, but also for domestic disciplinary regimes (Brown, 2008).Despite their apparent lack of materiality, theplaces of video games become materialized through the act of ludic participation: sciencefiction and fantasy constructions of place(Kitchin and Kneale, 2002) are linked to the body of the game player through a synergy

between what happens on screen and whathappens to the body (Shaw and Warf, 2009:1340). Following the logic of the video game,data of all sorts can be transformed into objectsarranged in the three-dimensional space visibleon a computer screen and accessed in the general process whereby we engage with virtual geo-graphies (Andreucci, 2008; see also Cranget al., 1999). The focus on a particular mediumwhen studying place-in-media is evident alsoin studies of websites (Purcell and Kodras,2001) and films (Aitken and Zonn, 1994;Acland, 2004; Lukinbeal, 2006).

A third approach focuses on particular geographical processes represented through arange of texts, discourses, and media. For example, Meindl et al. (2002) demonstrate how the process of real-estate development in the Ever-glades depended on pro-development depictionof the Everglades. Others have shown how place

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images created in situations of conflict, such aseditorials, speeches and even cartoons created,set up embodied relations between places (O Tuathail, 1996; Cosgrove and della Dora, 2005;Dittmer, 2005; 2007a, 2007b; Falah et al.,2006). Similarly strategic deployment of placeimages to represent processes can be seen var-iously in studies of climate and weather pro-cesses (Braun, 2005; Boykoff, 2007a, 2007b)and processes of social work (Vanderbeck,2008).

Questions can be raised at the juncture between this work and the other quadrants. Howare the politics of the place image affected by particular media and communications infra-structures? Where are particular place imagesconsumed and what kinds of relations exist between these places of consumption and the places portrayed? Who uses what images, and how do networks of shared image consumptionsupport political geographies that are differentfrom those behind the images? Finally, whatare the criteria of good place images so we mayoffer improvements rather than merely criti-quing them?

IV Media-in-placesDiverse strands of geographical theory including phenomenological geography and non-representational geography have shown thatcommunications cannot be understood exceptin place as part of places rich mixture of subjec-tivity, power, emotion, and affect. Various points of entry into the subject of media-in- place indicate that the media in question can be ancient or new, simple or sophisticated, and that the ways in which place is involved areoperative at a wide range of scales (Relph,1976; Tuan, 1977; Seamon, 1990, 1993; Thrift,2000, 2008; McGreevy, 2001). Most recentlythis approach has evolved in compelling direc-tions with discussions of code-space (Dodge and Kitchin, 2004, 2005, 2009), reassessments of behavioral geography (Kwan, 2000, 2002;

Adams, 2000), and non-representational theory(Thrift, 2008; Crouch, 2003; Lorimer, 2005;Rycroft, 2005; McCormack, 2005; Carter and McCormack, 2006). To engage this topic let usconsider the emplacement of music, art, and performance.

Yi-Fu Tuan concluded that you can changethe environment by introducing band musicand, objectively, one still marches from A to Bwith seeming deliberation. Subjectively, how-ever, space and time have lost their directionalthrust . . . The idea of a precisely located goalloses relevance (Tuan, 1977: 128). Here placeis a container for music as the street echoes withthe sound of the band, but this containment is notsimple, like the way a cup contains water, because the street is given its peculiar character by the music it contains. Geographer SusanJ. Smith utilizes the term soundscape to indi-cate that music is a means of creating and orga-nizing space, of marking time, and of definingidentity, through rituals which both assure soci-ety of its place in the world and advance a polit-ical programme for the future (Smith, 1997:510; see also Smith, 1994). The embodied, inter-

active, sound-place connection helps form placeas a historical and ethnic entity. For example, agirl of Irish background living in England wasurged to perform her Irish ethnicity whenever she traveled to Ireland, When we go back,every night its like Nualas coming, she candance and they push back the rug. My cousins back in Ireland dont do any of the Irish music or dancing . . . so theyre like Oh, its the Englishones who can do all the Irish stuff ! They like toshow us off (quoted in Leonard, 2005: 520 521). Here place has a complicated character:the place-in-the-girl as well as the girl-in-the- place are both marked by a kind of dislocation but are brought together by a particular soundscape.

Another fertile area for analysis of media-in- place is public art. Public involvement meansthat art is not only contained by a place but alsoincorporated into the essence of a place, bound




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to the lived experience of place (Sharp et al.,2005; Chang, 2008). The dynamic interaction between art and site has been described as thespatiality of art the links between social (art,artists, audience) and spatial (site, environment)(Chang, 2008: 1923). Geographers studying places as diverse as Venice, Adelaide, Singapore,Beijing, and Washington, DC, have identified monuments, statues and other embellishmentsthat are not only aesthetic elements but alsoconcretizations in place of dominant interpreta-tions of history, community, and subjectivity(Cosgrove, 1989; Kong and Law, 2002; Hayet al., 2004; Hoelscher and Alderman, 2004;Chang, 2008).

Private places are also inflected by communi-cation. For example, in the example cited at theoutset (Tutt, 2008) the living room is a site of struggle over access to communication techno-logies such as the telephone and internet, wherespoken words claiming objects and microterri-tories cross paths with the sounds of the televi-sion and other media. The workplace can also be understood as a place that is given a particular form and social dynamic by the communications

that take place in it, not only via various commu-nication technologies but also symbols and representations of work and workers, and aboutsexuality and power in the production and repro-duction of workplace inequalities (McDowell,1999: 146). At home or at work, no less thanin public places, power and personal identity areformed together by variously mediated commu-nications, taking the form of performances and representations, and these are always deeplyembedded in place and constitutive of what isseen as in-place and out-of-place (Cresswell,1996).

The media-in-place perspective also drawsattention to the performative character of life.In English the verb to act has a dual meaning:to do and to perform. By doing things in places people perform on various stages,placed in certain roles and subject to variousforms of authority, while new media rework

these theaters of social life so interaction canfollow new rules. Performative models of sociallife used by geographers have been developed from works as divergent as those of ErvingGoffman, Judith Butler, and Joshua Meyrowitz.Goffman (1961, 1973) understood social life asconsisting of a series of performances in a world that is divided into space-time manifoldswhere a person performs particular roles in order to convince him/herself, and others, of his/her social position. For Butler (1997), speech doesnot simply describe but also produces, through performativity. Meyrowitz (1985) argued thatelectronic media reconfigure social situationsand thereby rework social power relations alongaxes of gender, age, and political power.

The terms non-representational or more-than-representational expand the scope of com-munication under geographical consideration,revealing the most intimate ties between commu-nication and place (Lorimer, 2005). Modes of embodied, performative communication, in place, beyond, or parallel to representation, areincreasingly coming under geographical scrutiny(Thrift, 2008). Various modes of non-verbal com-

munication, including gardening, op-art, film,dance, and a form of movement therapy knownas eurhythmics, have been explored as elementsof the embodied encounter with place (Crouch,2003; Rose, 2003; Rycroft, 2005; McCormack,2005; Carterand McCormack, 2006). These stud-ies reject the familiar model of representationwith its signifier-signified relationship that dom-inates the place-image literature. Although oftenused to study non-verbal communication, thisapproachshedslighton aspects of verbal commu-nication, as well (Gooder and Jacobs, 2002).

These approaches to geography reveal mediaas mechanisms for the selective engineering of anxiety,obsession andcompulsion butalso showmore positive types of affect such as excitement, joy, hope, love, surprise, distress, anguish, fear,terror, anxiety, obsession, compulsion, shame,hatred, humiliation, contempt, disgust, anger and rage (Barnett, 2008: 191). This work has

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concentrated on small places microgeographieswhere the body and its performances are clearlyevident but a broader literature outside of geo-graphy reveals that such insights are not scaledependent (Innis, 1951, 1972; McLuhan, 1964;Eisenstein, 1979; Meyrowitz, 1985; Carey,1988; Mitchell, 1995).

Many questions remain to be answered. Towhat extent is place-experience of humansintrinsically affected by their use of words and to what extent is it possible to experience a placein a way that is free from verbal categories? Howdoes place serve to mediate between personalemotion and the embodied communication of affect? Is the interpretative latitude of placeexperience essentially unlimited or do previousinterpretations of place in effect channel further place interpretations via verbal and non-verbalcommunications? Questions can and should beopened up addressing the larger constructionsof place such as nation and world, as well, sinceeven the world can be experienced as a place(Tuan, 1977: 149; Cosgrove, 2001). Nonethe-less, the shift upwards in scale is quite oftenassociated with space rather than place, and it

is in that direction that we now turn.

V Media-in-spacesThe effort to define and conceptualize space has been marked by a philosophical divide betweenabsolute space models that put space beforesubstance, and relational space models that putsubstance before space (Sack, 1980). Linear distance, as the crow flies, demonstrates anabsolute space model. On this account, space isa stable, fixed system a Cartesian grid or grati-cule that carves up the globe. Alternatively, wecan start from the assumption that space is a product of the material things that are in it,including streets and freeways, stores and houses, telephone wires and fiber-optic cables,each of which creates an elastic and malleablespace. At the largest scale, the relational spacemodel supports the contention that cities

like New York, Tokyo, and London and their interconnections create the space in which capi-tal flows and resources are commanded (Dicken,1992; Castells, 1996; Sassen, 2001). Geogra- phers adopt both absolute and relational spacemodels, employingthem in turn, andeach illumi-nates certain aspects of mediated communica-tion. This becomes apparent if we scrutinize asample of studies.

A relational model of space viewing mediaand transportation systems as space adjustingtechnologies was introduced into geography inthe 1960s and 70s (Janelle, 1968; 1969; Abler et al., 1975; Brunn and Leinbach, 1991b). Theelasticity of relational space was observed byRon Abler, who found that complete time-space convergence in telephonic communica-tions is almost an accomplished fact (Abler,1975: 3840). Transformations of relationalspace were attributed to a cyclical process inwhich demands for accelerated interaction led to innovations in transportation technologies,which were incorporated into society, which led to further demands for accelerated interaction(Janelle, 1968, 1969). Terms like friction of dis-

tance still betrayed an absolute conception of space, but the interest in time-space, cost-space, convergence, and collapse indicated simultaneous adoption of the relational view of space.

Subsequent work on accessibility extended and multiplied the relational model of space and revealed that it is precisely the tension betweenabsolute and relative space that is fertile. HelenCouclelis, for example, described the change inaccessibility landscapes through substitutionof media for transportation, indicating ties between media geography and a broad geo-graphic literature on movement, mobility, and transportation (Couclelis, 2000: 341).

The discussion of time-space transformationvia media reached a turning point with DoreenMasseys observation that time-space conver-gence does not benefit everyone equally, rather some are more in charge of it than others; some




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initiate flows and movement, others dont; someare more on the receiving end of it than others;some are effectively imprisoned by it (Massey,1993: 61). Convergence proceeds at differentrates along different routes, and the concept of power geometry indicates space fragmented by a range of flows to and from a hierarchy of urban control points, key locations that orches-trate the development of overlapping relationalspaces (Webber, 1964; Castells, 1989, 1996;Harvey, 2000, 2001; Sassen, 2001, 2005).Quite commonly geographers dismiss claimsregarding the death of distance and the end of geography and reassert that communicationspaces create and depend on differentiation,specialization, and unevenness of power and control rather than on equalization or homogeni-zation (eg, Graham, 1998, 2001; Crampton,2003: 19). But convergence, divergence, homo-genization, and differentiation of space coexistand play off each other.

The blending of spatial models is evident in astudy of the evolution of submarine data trans-mission cable infrastructure (Malecki and Wei,2009). Absolute space is evident in the studys

conclusion that new paths are being formed toconnect China, India, and other places to theglobal network and the global economy(Malecki and Wei, 2009: 376) illustrated witha series of maps diagramming submarine cableroutes. A relational concept of space is assumed when comparing the three internet traffic routesfrom Europe to Asia west via the USA, east viaRussia and east via the Middle East; the first isleast expensive but slowest, while the third isfaster but more expensive. Here time-space and cost-space have different configurations and each affects interactions in distinct ways whichin turn affect the further deployment of infra-structure in absolute space. Similarly, space is both absolute and relational in the large bodyof research that traces the diffusion of internetaccess and infrastructure at global and regionalscales (Moss and Mitra, 1998; Moss and Town-send, 2000; Townsend 2001a, 2001b; Warf,

2001, 2007; Gorman and Malecki, 2002;OKelly and Grubesic, 2002; Rutherford et al.,2004; Grubesic and Murray, 2004; Zook, 2005;Warf and Vincent, 2007).

The media-in-space perspective highlightsunevenness, drawing attention to digital dividesthat appear globally between North and South aswell as between East and West, at the subna-tional and even the urban scale: wealthy inhabi-tants of Sao Paulo or Johannesburg have internetaccess while many Americans in the Mississippidelta or the Appalachians are off the Web (Lentzand Oden, 2001; Oden and Strover, 2002). At asmaller scale the communication spacesaccessed by different households within a townor city are hierarchically organized as a functionof within-neighbourhood and between-neighbourhood variability in engagement withnew technologies (Longley et al., 2008: 381;see also Graham and Marvin, 1996). Such varia-tions are locked into a vicious cycle as cherry picking brings infrastructure to the most power-ful places while bypassing less valued interven-ing ones, where access to even basic networked services becomes undermined, exacerbating

social divides and creating a splintering of social space (Graham and Marvin, 2001: 382).But if faster and easier access to certain mediais seen by wealthier audiences as a benefit, theflip side is the exploitation of well-connected consumers by the content channeled toward these spaces: If a given show is successful atimposing a monopoly over an audience, it hasdone so logistically by standardizing both phys-ical and social space through a geography of infrastructure to the end of annihilating timefor other activities (Rosati, 2007: 562).

The constant process of time-space conver-gence does not completely homogenize space but rather alters the relationships between placesand may well cause them to become less similar as increased economic interdependency and cap-ital mobility fuel processes of administrativecentralization, industrial specialization, outsour-cing and horizontal disintegration (Castells,

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1989; Graham, 1998; Harvey, 2001). The need to reassess geographical accessibility in lightof these insights has generated important edited volumes and monographs (Brunn and Leinbach,1991a; Graham and Marvin, 1996, 2001;Crang et al., 1999; Janelle and Hodge, 2000;Christopher, 2009). With wireless technology,developed countries are moving into an era of pervasive or ubiquitous computing, but ubiqui-tous does not mean uniform: new communica-tion technologies are appropriated morequickly by centrally located businesses withina country or region and investment in new mediatechnologies is highly localized at national and international scales (Zook, 2005; Torrens,2008; Weltevreden et al., 2008; McDowellet al., 2008). Likewise, the art and cultureindustry disseminating images through medianetworks remains one of the most highly centra-lized industries (Currid and Connolly, 2008).

From convergence and collapse, to power geometries and accessibility landscapes, withexcursions to centralized decentralization,splintering, and standardization, geographershave implicated media quite multifariously in

the reworking of spaces. Activities and encoun-ters are contextualized in more and more complicated ways as media reconfigure spaces.Both the infrastructure and the social forces building and funding infrastructure participatein a differentiated, relational space. Yet so longas geographers still show communication sys-tems on maps that are drawn in accordance withstandard cartographic projections, the absoluteconcept of space is used to visualize relationalspaces. Infrastructure is built, as well, in a kind of space where linear distance still matters eco-nomically and practically.

The simultaneous insertion of activity inabsolute and relational spaces is a workablemodel of the human condition and highlights thetension between spaces of mobility and spacesof communication. Many questions arise againin response to other quadrants. How do conceptsof place and privacy vary in relation to levels of

connectedness? How does compression or convergence of time-space and cost-space in amedia network work to enhance or inhibit publicdebate? What kind of place images arise out of and help to sustain a centralized or decentralized communication infrastructure? How is the topol-ogy of an infrastructure network related to thesocial network topologies it can support? Suchinterests point us toward the final and most elu-sive corner of the quadrant diagram.

VI Spaces-in-mediaOf the four quadrants this is the least familiar although we live in it as much as in the others.An epistemological framework to study thisquadrant is only beginning to appear, but we canalready point to a group of related ideas topo-logies of communication, social networks, vir-tual places, surveillance, and code-space.These various concepts converge around theidea that communications are a kind of space that is, a structured realm of interaction that bothenables and constrains occupants in particular ways. This idea can be traced from works in

philosophy of language all the way to theoriesof digital telecommunication.For linguists who support the Sapir-Whorf

hypothesis, linguistic differences lie at the rootof differences in perception and behavior(Whorf,1956; Sapir, 1983; Vygotsky, 1986). The conceptof linguistic relativity, and hence of language as aform of containeror boundary,areof course moredeeply rooted in Western philosophy: Platoscave is a space constituted in and by the lan-guage(s) we speak. Heideggers concept of language: Language is the house of Being. In itshome man dwells (Heidegger, 1977 [1947])resonates with Lacans view of the unconsciousas linguistically structured insofar as languageinhabits us and we in turn inhabit language and the wall of language is no less confining than itsmaterial counterparts (Lacan, 1966, 1981).

People consciously or unconsciously speak inways that align them with a particular group




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as insiders, while simultaneously placing thespeaker outside spaces dominated by the tonguesofOthers. Thus talk and talking are central to the production of most everyday spaces and whatyou speak is where you are (Valentine et al.,2008: 384, 385; see also Pred 1990). Geographi-cal processes such as imperialism have thereforedepended on the creation of discursive networkswith particular routes and nodes (Lester, 2002).There is consequently a potential to excavate ahistorical geography of spaces in languagereaching back to the earliest oral spaces and evol-ving through the development of writing and subsequent media (Adams, 2009: 1328).

We can follow in the footsteps of AdrianMackenzie and turn from the earliest to the latestmedia. The diffusion of new media helps bringabout powerful dynamics of belonging, participation, separation, and exclusion typical of con-temporary network cultures (Mackenzie, 2009:1295).Mackenziedescribedthe dynamic created by the boxed labyrinth of software, codes, and hardware of wireless communication which: is arelatively invisible, messy, amorphous, shiftingset of depths and distances that lacks the visible

form and organization of other entities produced by centres of calculation (Mackenzie, 2009:13051306). Such discussions of spaces-in-media can be read as extended metaphors, butgeographers are beginning to recognize thatsoftware can, quite literally, make space. Code beckons into being sociospatial relations that aredependenton theeffectiveoperation of software(Dodgeet al., 2009: 1285).An international busi-ness headquarters or a grocery store checkoutlane serves to illustrate the idea of code/space,where a particular space fails to function if for some reason the associated code becomes unusa- ble. In other cases code merely augments theform, function, and meaning of a space, or lingers in the background as a potential elementof space, for example in freeways with auto-mated billing systems that obtain an identifica-tion signal from devices installed in passingcars (Dodge and Kitchin, 2005). Similar ideas

were previously articulated in regard to masscommunications in terms of flowmations and spaces of transmission (Luke and O Tuathail,1998; see also Morley and Robins, 1995).Communication is therefore a social processimplemented by technologies and particular lan-guages/codes, but also a spatial process creatingspaces of inclusion and exclusion.

As a further example, we can consider thecommunicational dynamics of the D/deaf 1 sincedeafness is a type of social marginality thatarises directly from embodied aspects of theability to communicate. At the level of language,inclusion/exclusion of the D/deaf depends on thedevelopment of sign languages formal, shared,and fully nuanced gestural languages such asAmerican Sign Language (ASL) and BritishSign Language (BSL). The formalization of, and teaching of, languages for the eyes rather thanthe ears mark a linguistic shift towards treatingthose with hearing impairment as fully compe-tent persons with special characteristics rather than marginalizing them as defective speakers,yet at the same time these languages draw theminto a social network space inaccessible to many

of the hearing (Baynton, 1998). Inclusion and exclusion also arise from institutional responsesto deafness. Legal frameworks such as theAmericans with Disabilities Act (1990) and theUKs Disability Discrimination Act (1995)require businesses and local governments toguarantee access and hence inclusion for thedeaf and the hearing impaired. A very differentinstitutional response is the creation of Deaf Professional Happy Hour (in the USA) or Deaf clubs (in the UK) which are periodic sign-language based social gatherings ephemeralspaces for the Deaf which exclude those whodo not speak sign-language (Valentine and Skel-ton, 2007). Finally, technological responses tohearing impairment include a video relay system(VRS) which is not only an institutionalresponse but also a technological response. Itdepends on access of the Deaf to a videophonetechnology, which is a relatively recent

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innovation at least at a practical level, combined with government funded sign-language transla-tors. Here technology assists in the inclusion of speaking and signing persons in a single socialspace, but it incorporates technologies like theordinary telephone, which originally created barriers to social participation.

The situation of the D/deaf is an indication of the more general principle that spaces in com-munication are created through a combinationof inclusion and exclusion by languages, institu-tions and technologies. Other groups such asimmigrants and racial, religious and ethnicminorities have also been excluded and included in very particular ways by languages, institu-tions, and technologies (Pile, 2000; Adams and Ghose, 2003; Pratt, 2005; Secor, 2007; Gregory,2007; Hyndman and Mountz, 2007; Adams and Skop, 2008; Skop and Adams, 2009).

All of the above again raises questions cuttingacross the quadrants. How are social spaces of inclusion and exclusion reflected in place repre-sentations? How does the distribution of infrastructure in space arise from and contributeto inclusionary and exclusionary processes?

Insofar as particular spaces of inclusion and exclusion exist in media what effects do theyhave on practices in place? So issues connected to spaces-in-media weave across the other threequadrants.

VII Transcending the dichotomiesThe generative potential of any taxonomy liesnot so much in the affinities it suggests as in thebetweens it helps to identify. We are cautioned to be critical of dichotomies, to envision third-spaces (Soja, 1996), and to shift attention to the performances that create points of contact rather than naturalizing differences (Thrift, 2008).Even if two poles are mutually constitutive ina dialectic of spatiality (Giddens, 1984; Harvey,1990), one seems always to end up dominatingthe other so we should be cautious of space/placeand content/context. If we seek to inspire change

rather than stasis, a less dichotomous approachmay be required.

[A]ctors will be said to be simultaneously held bythe context and holding it in place, while the contextwill be at once what makes actors behave and whatis being made in turn by the actors feedback. Withcircular gestures of the two hands turning faster and faster in opposite directions, it is possible to give anappearance of smooth reason to a connection between two sites whose existence remains as pro- blematic as before. (Latour, 2005: 169)

Insofar as it is sometimes difficult to maintainthe space/place distinction or the content/contextdistinction without the vague hand gesturesspotted by Latour we perhaps need to rethink what might lie at the center of the diagram, sug-gested by all of the studies discussed here yetsomehow missed by all of them, as well.

Rather than a set of four quadrants, we canthink instead of a field whose corners are defined by intersecting oppositions but whose middleremains a mystery (Figure 2). The question mark indicates an area open to investigations whichmove away from assumptions of scale thatalways creep into the space/place dichotomy aswell as the presumptions of causality that

Figure 2. The quadrant diagram opened up toinvestigations between the polar oppositionsSource: Authors diagram




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underlie the content/context dichotomy. Whilesome geographical critiques of scale are proneto substitute the horizontal for the vertical(Marston et al., 2005; Jones et al., 2007), or toreplace a space of places with a space of flows(in Castells 1989 terminology), what is implied here is to recognize localized and non-localized emergent events of differential relations actua-lized as temporary often mobile sites inwhich the social unfolds (Marston et al.,2005: 423).

Latour argues that computer-mediated com-munication does not cause individuals to beconstituted in andby networks, but rather it worksto make visible what was before only presentvirtually, namely the fact that for human beingscompetency comes in discreet pellets or, to bor-row from cyberspace, patches and applets , whose precise origin can be Googled before they aredownloaded and saved one by one (Latour,2005: 207). To be an actor is therefore alwaysto enact oneself as a traceable gathering sincewhat seems to be the self is derived from variousnot-self elements, and media are nearly alwaysmediators rather than intermediaries , in other

words translators rather than conduits (Latour,2005: 40). Competence is a matter of having theright plug-ins and people can be described as being amoebas having a star-like shape because their competencies are both internal tothe self and distributed through various networks(Adams, 1995, 2005; Latour, 2005: 208209).

The same can be said of other entities and beings. Sarah Whatmore, for example, discussesthe ways in which animals are mobilized(Whatmore, 2002: 3557). A brochure promot-ing ecotourism may employ an image of anelephant as a means of capturing the interest of potential ecotourists. The elephant body is trans-lated into a photographic image on paper, whichis translated into international flows of peopleand money, then into a volunteer-based ecologi-cal data-collection system, then into scientificreports, and finally into government policies.But finally is only a useful way to end this

sentence. The network goes on. Elephantscirculate as virtual bodies in another set of paths linked more circuitously to the first: thegenetic data supporting captive breeding pro-grams (flows of names, dates, and elephantsemen) and in quite different flows supportingvarious types of habitat creation (public discus-sions regarding the quality of animal enclosuresin zoos). Whatmores work demonstrates thatwhat is mobilized or translated in an actor net-work goes beyond conventional uses of com-munication. Every body (human and animal)circulates through translations only some of which fit the definition of communication yetall of which are interlinked, simultaneouslyfolding or pleating space and place (What-more, 2002: 56; Deleuze, 2006). Thus communi-cation includes not only shared conversations but also semiotic-material technologies (What-more, 2002: 159; see also Haraway, 1991: 192).

These concepts of hybridity, translation, and actor networks may be understood as alterna-tives to the space/place and content/contextdichotomies. They suggest that if a Cartesianspace seems to be staked out by the more estab-

lished perspectives, our thought processes arenot in fact stuck to this two-dimensional surface.The question mark at the center opens up a newterrain for geographers interested in followingthe actors wherever they may go and however they may be translated. It is too early to guesswhether this will become more important thanthe rectilinear analytical space it destabilizes and troubles. What is clear, however, is that commu-nication is at least as important in these folded or pleated spaces/places as in the contained and containing spaces/places discussed previously.

VIII ConclusionPeter Gould suggested rather pugnaciously thatcommunication should be seen as Somethingthat is shared everything from a kiss to an inter-national shipment of grain (Gould, 1991: 3).But if everything that moves is communication,

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and at some point everything moves , then thegeography of communication has an unlimited scope. It therefore requires a few guideposts.I have worked to show where these might be. Arewe interested in what a particular text or dis-course has to say about a particular place, or in how position is affected by connections and flows, or in how interconnections constitute a particular social space of inclusion and exclusion,or in how places accommodate media and media become ingredients in places? If none of thesealternatives make sense, we may be looking atcommunications associated with translations,hybridity, actor networks, horizontality, and aflat ontology. In this case, communications areno longer seen as arcs between here and there or this and that; they instead become integral to thehere-ness and there-ness, this-ness and that-nessof boundless selves (Adams, 2005).

It may be that the best way to answer a ques-tion involves moving between the corners. Whatat first seems to be a simple matter of measuringthe acceleration of data flow between point Aand point B becomes, with the introduction of the second corner a question of how social topol-

ogies evolve in and through such connections.Likewise, a study may start by noting the impor-tance of a place image in the media, for examplethe politicized image of the US-Mexico border, but on further consideration the border in themedia becomes multiple borders embedded inmyriad living rooms, offices, cars, and so forth.We may even envision a peculiar kind of studythat engages with one corner of the quadrant before or after moving to the transcendentANT-space at the center. This would be a depar-ture from the vision of coherence that informscurrent geographical studies but it would dealwith communication in a balanced, flexible, and productive way.

New and more productive questions arise between and across all the positions indicated here in the conceptual scheme. How do placeimages affect peoples willingness to build theinfrastructure and topological networks that

channel and diffuse communication? When dosocial networks and their communication topo-logies stimulate communication infrastructuredevelopment and when do they substitute for such development? How can a sense of place be strengthened by the reassertion of certain physical and topological networks of communi-cation links? How does language of bias and dis-crimination, whether mobilized by strong or weak actors and in central or peripheral places,exploit the unevenness of communication infra-structure? What kinds of bias and discriminationcan be overcome by the proliferation of commu-nication infrastructure and what kinds requireother responses? How is subjectivity altered as processes and forms of agency move from onekind of social and experiential context toanother, that is, from spaces to places to commu-nication infrastructures to network topologies?

The relationships between space, place,and media indicated here incorporate viewsthat seem to be diametrically opposed. We arehelped by the concept of heterarchy (Bondar-enko, 2005) whereby something might be con-tained but also at the same time be a container.

Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift can be credited with bringing the idea of heterarchy into geo-graphy (Amin and Thrift, 2005), but, as is oftenthe case, art and literature anticipated thisinsight. Heterarchic views of space and placeare indicated most strikingly by the enigmaticshort stories of Jorge Luis Borges (1962) and the impossible spaces depicted in the etchingsof M.C. Escher. These paradoxical worlds inverbal and visual media were not wholly fanta-sies; they mirrored the worlds that we as com-municators and actors actually inhabit whereevery container is contained by what it holdsand place does not obediently stay bounded by space. Once we entertain the notion of heterarchy in connection with media, space and place, we may catch up with art and literatureand begin to recognize many more of the compelling geographical questions raised by mediaand communications.




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Note1. The capitalized term Deaf indicates a strongly-

bonded subordinate group that has developed anoppositional interpretation of its members social and political interests and needs (Valentine and Skelton,2007: 131) while deaf with a small d indicates a physical, biological condition (Erting et al., 1994;Bragg, 2001; Ladd, 2003).

AcknowledgementsMy thanks to Professor Andre Jansson at Karlstad University for his invitation to write this article,albeit for a different journal, and my thanks to theanonymous reviewers of this journal for their con-structive comments and suggestions which led tosubstantial improvements.

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