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A taxonomy for communication geography


Paul C. Adams Prog Hum Geogr 2011 35: 37 originally published online 14 July 2010 DOI: 10.1177/0309132510368451 The online version of this article can be found at: http://phg.sagepub.com/content/35/1/37

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Progress in Human Geography 35(1) 3757 The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav 10.1177/0309132510368451 phg.sagepub.com

A taxonomy for communication geography


Paul C. Adams
The University of Texas at Austin, USA

Abstract We transmit 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 spatial route between particular places. These observations indicate opposing forms of containment: spaces and places contain communications yet are also contained by communications. We can accept these complementary views as keys to the organization of the various types of research in communication geography. A fifth approach is evident, as well, which transcends the dichotomies of space/place and content/context an epistemology that is inherently scaleless. Keywords geography 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 referring to communications or media. Most references are oblique, as when an article is an attempt to destabilize environmental views promoted by the media, but some are direct, as in studies of particular uses of certain media. This interest in mediated communication was not the case in the late 1990s, when Ken Hillis wrote about the invisibility of communications in geography (1998). Since that time, an online journal of media geography, Aether, has published several issues and a specialty group dedicated to Communication Geography has emerged in the Association of American Geographers paralleling some of the interests of the older Geography of the Global Information Society commission in the International Geographical Union. In Britain, despite the absence of an RGS-IBG

study group dedicated to the topic, a phenomenal amount of interest has been directed towards new media and communication topics in the past five years. Interest in media is tangential to the main orientation of many studies, but it lies behind a wide range of concerns such as identity formation, narrative, scale, discourses, publics, and networks. The subdisciplines most engaged in studies of media are urban, 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 are varied and as such they merit efforts to clarify and elucidate.

Corresponding author: Department of Geography and the Environment, The University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station A3100, Austin, Texas 78712, USA Email: paul.adams@mail.utexas.edu 37

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Whether in the US, the UK, or elsewhere, the surge of interest in communications and media is presently quite diverse in goals and objectives. That is to say, not only do communicationrelated topics come up in various geographic specializations, but within any of these specializations the questions addressed are quite heterogeneous. The purpose of this article is to offer a taxonomic 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 several scholars use to situate their engagements with media and communications:
This paper examines the hegemonic geographical imaginaries underlying visual and textual representations of border-protected areas, as found in state and national media, government documents, local newsletters, and internet sites. (Sundberg and Kaserman, 2007: 729) [T]his paper demonstrates the enormous amount of tactical work invested in the practice and performance of living room interactions with media, not least in securing access to a medium in the first place, as the teenagers claim their stake in daily living. (Tutt, 2008: 2331) Through the invasive deployment of media machinery, media companies like MTV can better captivate emergent structures of feeling and as such better transform the means of cultural production to intensify the industrial production of culture. (Rosati, 2007: 571) First, I am interested in mapping and visualizing Wi-Fi presence in urban settings. Second, I explore the underlying infrastructure that supports Wi-Fi data traffic. Third, I study the technical functionality of that infrastructure and its associated cloud of Wi-Fi transmissions. (Torrens, 2008: 62)

Although all of these authors are studying contemporary communications from a geographic perspective, each of them approaches
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communication geography from a distinctly different angle. Sundberg and Kaserman are interested in newspaper and television representations of the US-Mexico borderlands, Tutt is interested in how the telephone becomes the object of territorial conflicts in the living room, Rosati is interested in MTVs conquest of global audiences and Torrens is interested in mapping wireless data transmission infrastructure. In these four articles we see two intersecting axes of tension. One of these, the pull between space and place, has been discussed in the geographical literature for decades. The second tension is more elusive, and arises from contrasting assumptions regarding (a) the containment of mediated experiences within real, physical contexts of interaction, or (b) the real world as that which is captured, packaged, and transmitted by mediated contexts of interaction. In other words, we can understand place and space as either the contents of communications or the context of communications. The studies stake out the corners of a conceptual space divided into four quadrants: place-in-media (Sundberg and Kaserman), media-in-place (Tutt), space-inmedia (Rosati), and media-in-space (Torrens). The quadripartite scheme is pertinent to many different approaches in geography and useful for indicating the complementarity of various approaches that are presently treated as either unrelated or mutually contradictory. More examples and details are treated elsewhere (Adams, 2009) but here I carry the theoretical implications forward by resituating actor-network theory in a boundary zone between space and place and between the content and contextoriented perspectives. My exploration parallels some excellent recent work in media and communication studies (Couldry and McCarthy, 2004; Falkheimer and Jansson, 2006). My primary purpose is to suggest wideranging and theoretically promising affinities among works that currently are presented as having no potential to speak to each other, or are cast as 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 with newness. The term communications has unfortunately come to connote electronic and particularly digital technologies of communication whereas the denotation of the term is in fact much broader. Likewise, media has slid towards meaning new material arrangements for communication whereas the term can indicate any communication arrangement, old or new, and not just the material ingredients but also the social ingredients (languages, codes, institutions, beliefs, types of knowledge, sources of funding, legal frameworks, etc) that permit that arrangement to mediate. To broaden still further, I use communications and media to refer to exchanges, but not necessarily exchanges of information and not necessarily between humans. Media, as I use it, encompasses arrangements that connect one to one, one to many, many to one, and many to many. With this broad net, let us go on to snare a few of the many works that illustrate the two tensions and a stance that attempts to transcend the tensions.

II The tensions
Communications-related geographic research is drawn into the four-fold dynamics defined by two independent distinctions: space/place and content/context (Adams, 2009). Space and place form a fundamental opposition at an ontological level, 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 the essence or foundation of stability, coherence, and particularity (Relph, 1976; Sack, 1980; Harvey, 1996; Cresswell, 2004; Duncan and

Duncan, 2004). Complicating this is the consensus that analytically and politically we should conceive of any given place in terms of a particular mix of connections to other places (Massey, 1993) and the recognition that places are not simply small pieces or subdivisions of space since space itself is given meaning, directionality and proportion by places (Casey, 2001). These poles define the opposing pulls of communication, toward stability on the one hand and movement on the other toward durability versus change, boundedness versus expansiveness. Not only do communications mediate between space and place, but they do so in ways that are part of a second dialectic structured by the tension between communications as context and communications as contents. Space is where communication happens but is also one of the things created by communications, and, as Cresswell (2004: 15) writes, place is not simply something to be observed, researched and written about but is itself part of the way we see, research and write. This paradoxical condition of mutual containment resists the imposition of hierarchical models and is captured instead by Dmitri Bondarenkos (2005) concept of heterarchy. The primary intersections and contrasts are shown in Figure 1. Henri Lefebvre suggests some of the complexity in The Production of Space (1991). First in his scheme are representational spaces, the spaces of communication lived directly by artists, writers, and philosophers which mainly occupy the media-in-places quadrant. Second are representations of space, which are abstract, theoretical, and production-oriented spaces involving the formal plans and abstract blueprints of powerful actors whose formalizations of space control actions. These are spaces-in-media. Third comes spatial practice which involves concrete actions and representations brought together in a way that secretes every landscape and gives it its particularity. Here elements of media-in-places and places-in-media
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Figure 1. The quadrant diagram demonstrating the dialectics of space/place and content/context. The numbers in the quadrants indicate the order in which topics are introduced in the body of this paper.
Source: Authors diagram, after Adams (2009: 4)

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

III Places-in-media
Geographical 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). Such works were inspired by literature, philosophy, and anthropology, and they revealed the intimate ties between sense of self, sense of place, and various modes of representation. Cognitive and behavioral psychology inspired other geographers to show how place images support wayfinding within the city and to study the role of preferences in spatial decision-making
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(Gould and White, 1974; Downs and Stea, 1977). As early as the 1970s, Relph critiqued place images in the media, noting that places reliant on tourism revenues were often made over 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, symbolic constructionism, 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 image were succinctly captured for geographers in the introduction to Writing Worlds: [D]iscourses are both enabling as well as constraining: they determine answers to questions, as well as the questions that can be asked. More generally, a discourse constitutes the limits within which ideas and practices are considered to be natural; that is, they set the bounds on what questions are considered relevant or even intelligible (Barnes and Duncan, 1992b: 8). The critical approach to place images generated a rich geographical literature 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 ontological stance of social constructionism originating in the sociological analysis of language as something that typifies experiences, allowing me to subsume them under broad categories in terms of which they have meaning not only to myself but also to my fellowmen (Berger and Luckmann, 1967: 38). As Mona Domosh argued, this had direct implications in geography since: There is no necessary causal relationship between places and their imaginative

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forms (Domosh, 1990: 27). Further borrowings illuminated dynamic interactions between spatial arrangements, perception, knowledge, and social power (Foucault, 1975, 1980, 1988 [1965]; Lefebvre, 1991). A primary objective in this work was to reveal the ways in which place images were offered as innocent or politically neutral as well as the strategic manipulation of such images. With this critique of geographic representation came a questioning of aesthetic criteria such as beauty and naturalistic criteria such as accuracy, with both frameworks of judgment recast as expressions of power. To the insights from literary theory, philosophy, and the social sciences regarding representation, geographers added an original argument regarding the way maps speak a cartographic language no more innocent than any other language (Harley, 1988, 1992 [1989]; Monmonier, 1991; Pickles, 1992; Wood, 1992; Woodward, 1992; Herb, 1997). If the map is a place image among other place images then it also like other place images is a means of buttressing a particular social hierarchy, including and excluding certain individuals and groups, and potentially resisting or evading manifestations of power. Any supposed progress made in cartographic representation, for example through remote sensing and GIS, must be assessed in terms of who benefits and who loses as a result of its proliferation (Pickles, 1995, 2004; Schuurman, 2004). Studies of place images can focus on a particular place (real or imagined), a particular medium (verbal or visual, or both), or on a particular geographical process. A well-researched example of the first approach is the American West, which was already a myth when Europeans and 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 moral geography (Tatum, 1982; Savage, 1994; Delyser, 2001; Smith, 2001: 309). Such texts implied a need for transformation fusion of wilderness

and civilization to form a middle landscape between existential opposites (Shortridge, 1989). And like every discourse they had strategic 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 can also focus on a particular medium. For example, computer games represent a vision of place which disguises and perpetuates the worldview of the author/artist, who in this case is a programmer (Longan, 2008). Their place images often require that the player participates in conquest, colonization, and government, although they may conversely suggest political resistance and postcolonial impulses (Breger, 2008). Computer games create contexts for armed conflict and colonial social relations, but also for domestic disciplinary regimes (Brown, 2008). Despite their apparent lack of materiality, the places of video games become materialized through the act of ludic participation: science fiction 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 what happens to the body (Shaw and Warf, 2009: 1340). Following the logic of the video game, data of all sorts can be transformed into objects arranged in the three-dimensional space visible on a computer screen and accessed in the general process whereby we engage with virtual geographies (Andreucci, 2008; see also Crang et al., 1999). The focus on a particular medium when studying place-in-media is evident also in 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 a range of texts, discourses, and media. For example, Meindl et al. (2002) demonstrate how the process of real-estate development in the Everglades depended on pro-development depiction of the Everglades. Others have shown how place
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images created in situations of conflict, such as editorials, 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 place images to represent processes can be seen variously in studies of climate and weather processes (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. How are the politics of the place image affected by particular media and communications infrastructures? Where are particular place images consumed 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 consumption support political geographies that are different from those behind the images? Finally, what are the criteria of good place images so we may offer improvements rather than merely critiquing them?

IV Media-in-places
Diverse strands of geographical theory including phenomenological geography and nonrepresentational geography have shown that communications cannot be understood except in place as part of places rich mixture of subjectivity, power, emotion, and affect. Various points of entry into the subject of media-inplace indicate that the media in question can be ancient or new, simple or sophisticated, and that the ways in which place is involved are operative at a wide range of scales (Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1977; Seamon, 1990, 1993; Thrift, 2000, 2008; McGreevy, 2001). Most recently this approach has evolved in compelling directions with discussions of code-space (Dodge and Kitchin, 2004, 2005, 2009), reassessments of behavioral geography (Kwan, 2000, 2002;
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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 us consider the emplacement of music, art, and performance. Yi-Fu Tuan concluded that you can change the environment by introducing band music and, objectively, one still marches from A to B with seeming deliberation. Subjectively, however, space and time have lost their directional thrust . . . The idea of a precisely located goal loses relevance (Tuan, 1977: 128). Here place is a container for music as the street echoes with the sound of the band, but this containment is not simple, like the way a cup contains water, because the street is given its peculiar character by the music it contains. Geographer Susan J. Smith utilizes the term soundscape to indicate that music is a means of creating and organizing space, of marking time, and of defining identity, through rituals which both assure society of its place in the world and advance a political programme for the future (Smith, 1997: 510; see also Smith, 1994). The embodied, interactive, sound-place connection helps form place as a historical and ethnic entity. For example, a girl of Irish background living in England was urged to perform her Irish ethnicity whenever she traveled to Ireland, When we go back, every night its like Nualas coming, she can dance 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 English ones who can do all the Irish stuff! They like to show 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-theplace are both marked by a kind of dislocation but are brought together by a particular soundscape. Another fertile area for analysis of media-inplace is public art. Public involvement means that art is not only contained by a place but also incorporated 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 the spatiality 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 embellishments that are not only aesthetic elements but also concretizations in place of dominant interpretations of history, community, and subjectivity (Cosgrove, 1989; Kong and Law, 2002; Hay et al., 2004; Hoelscher and Alderman, 2004; Chang, 2008). Private places are also inflected by communication. For example, in the example cited at the outset (Tutt, 2008) the living room is a site of struggle over access to communication technologies such as the telephone and internet, where spoken words claiming objects and microterritories cross paths with the sounds of the television 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 communication technologies but also symbols and representations of work and workers, and about sexuality and power in the production and reproduction of workplace inequalities (McDowell, 1999: 146). At home or at work, no less than in public places, power and personal identity are formed together by variously mediated communications, taking the form of performances and representations, and these are always deeply embedded in place and constitutive of what is seen as in-place and out-of-place (Cresswell, 1996). The media-in-place perspective also draws attention 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 various forms of authority, while new media rework

these theaters of social life so interaction can follow new rules. Performative models of social life used by geographers have been developed from works as divergent as those of Erving Goffman, Judith Butler, and Joshua Meyrowitz. Goffman (1961, 1973) understood social life as consisting of a series of performances in a world that is divided into space-time manifolds where a person performs particular roles in order to convince him/herself, and others, of his/her social position. For Butler (1997), speech does not simply describe but also produces, through performativity. Meyrowitz (1985) argued that electronic media reconfigure social situations and thereby rework social power relations along axes of gender, age, and political power. The terms non-representational or morethan-representational expand the scope of communication under geographical consideration, revealing the most intimate ties between communication and place (Lorimer, 2005). Modes of embodied, performative communication, in place, beyond, or parallel to representation, are increasingly coming under geographical scrutiny (Thrift, 2008). Various modes of non-verbal communication, including gardening, op-art, film, dance, and a form of movement therapy known as eurhythmics, have been explored as elements of the embodied encounter with place (Crouch, 2003; Rose, 2003; Rycroft, 2005; McCormack, 2005; Carter and McCormack, 2006). These studies reject the familiar model of representation with its signifier-signified relationship that dominates the place-image literature. Although often used to study non-verbal communication, this approach sheds light on aspects of verbal communication, as well (Gooder and Jacobs, 2002). These approaches to geography reveal media as mechanisms for the selective engineering of anxiety, obsession and compulsion but also show more 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 microgeographies where the body and its performances are clearly evident but a broader literature outside of geography reveals that such insights are not scale dependent (Innis, 1951, 1972; McLuhan, 1964; Eisenstein, 1979; Meyrowitz, 1985; Carey, 1988; Mitchell, 1995). Many questions remain to be answered. To what extent is place-experience of humans intrinsically affected by their use of words and to what extent is it possible to experience a place in a way that is free from verbal categories? How does place serve to mediate between personal emotion and the embodied communication of affect? Is the interpretative latitude of place experience essentially unlimited or do previous interpretations of place in effect channel further place interpretations via verbal and non-verbal communications? Questions can and should be opened up addressing the larger constructions of place such as nation and world, as well, since even the world can be experienced as a place (Tuan, 1977: 149; Cosgrove, 2001). Nonetheless, the shift upwards in scale is quite often associated with space rather than place, and it is in that direction that we now turn.

V Media-in-spaces
The effort to define and conceptualize space has been marked by a philosophical divide between absolute space models that put space before substance, and relational space models that put substance before space (Sack, 1980). Linear distance, as the crow flies, demonstrates an absolute space model. On this account, space is a stable, fixed system a Cartesian grid or graticule that carves up the globe. Alternatively, we can 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 malleable space. At the largest scale, the relational space model supports the contention that cities
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like New York, Tokyo, and London and their interconnections create the space in which capital flows and resources are commanded (Dicken, 1992; Castells, 1996; Sassen, 2001). Geographers adopt both absolute and relational space models, employing them in turn, and each illuminates certain aspects of mediated communication. This becomes apparent if we scrutinize a sample of studies. A relational model of space viewing media and transportation systems as space adjusting technologies was introduced into geography in the 1960s and 70s (Janelle, 1968; 1969; Abler et al., 1975; Brunn and Leinbach, 1991b). The elasticity of relational space was observed by Ron Abler, who found that complete timespace convergence in telephonic communications is almost an accomplished fact (Abler, 1975: 3840). Transformations of relational space were attributed to a cyclical process in which 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 distance still betrayed an absolute conception of space, but the interest in time-space, costspace, 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 between absolute and relative space that is fertile. Helen Couclelis, for example, described the change in accessibility landscapes through substitution of media for transportation, indicating ties between media geography and a broad geographic literature on movement, mobility, and transportation (Couclelis, 2000: 341). The discussion of time-space transformation via media reached a turning point with Doreen Masseys observation that time-space convergence 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; some are more on the receiving end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it (Massey, 1993: 61). Convergence proceeds at different rates 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 orchestrate the development of overlapping relational spaces (Webber, 1964; Castells, 1989, 1996; Harvey, 2000, 2001; Sassen, 2001, 2005). Quite commonly geographers dismiss claims regarding the death of distance and the end of geography and reassert that communication spaces create and depend on differentiation, specialization, and unevenness of power and control rather than on equalization or homogenization (eg, Graham, 1998, 2001; Crampton, 2003: 19). But convergence, divergence, homogenization, and differentiation of space coexist and play off each other. The blending of spatial models is evident in a study of the evolution of submarine data transmission cable infrastructure (Malecki and Wei, 2009). Absolute space is evident in the studys conclusion that new paths are being formed to connect China, India, and other places to the global network and the global economy (Malecki and Wei, 2009: 376) illustrated with a series of maps diagramming submarine cable routes. A relational concept of space is assumed when comparing the three internet traffic routes from Europe to Asia west via the USA, east via Russia and east via the Middle East; the first is least expensive but slowest, while the third is faster but more expensive. Here time-space and cost-space have different configurations and each affects interactions in distinct ways which in turn affect the further deployment of infrastructure in absolute space. Similarly, space is both absolute and relational in the large body of research that traces the diffusion of internet access and infrastructure at global and regional scales (Moss and Mitra, 1998; Moss and Townsend, 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 highlights unevenness, drawing attention to digital divides that appear globally between North and South as well as between East and West, at the subnational and even the urban scale: wealthy inhabitants of Sao Paulo or Johannesburg have internet access while many Americans in the Mississippi delta or the Appalachians are off the Web (Lentz and Oden, 2001; Oden and Strover, 2002). At a smaller scale the communication spaces accessed by different households within a town or city are hierarchically organized as a function of within-neighbourhood and betweenneighbourhood variability in engagement with new technologies (Longley et al., 2008: 381; see also Graham and Marvin, 1996). Such variations are locked into a vicious cycle as cherry picking brings infrastructure to the most powerful places while bypassing less valued intervening 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 media is seen by wealthier audiences as a benefit, the flip side is the exploitation of well-connected consumers by the content channeled toward these spaces: If a given show is successful at imposing a monopoly over an audience, it has done so logistically by standardizing both physical and social space through a geography of infrastructure to the end of annihilating time for other activities (Rosati, 2007: 562). The constant process of time-space convergence does not completely homogenize space but rather alters the relationships between places and may well cause them to become less similar as increased economic interdependency and capital mobility fuel processes of administrative centralization, industrial specialization, outsourcing and horizontal disintegration (Castells,
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1989; Graham, 1998; Harvey, 2001). The need to reassess geographical accessibility in light of 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 ubiquitous does not mean uniform: new communication technologies are appropriated more quickly by centrally located businesses within a country or region and investment in new media technologies is highly localized at national and international scales (Zook, 2005; Torrens, 2008; Weltevreden et al., 2008; McDowell et al., 2008). Likewise, the art and culture industry disseminating images through media networks remains one of the most highly centralized industries (Currid and Connolly, 2008). From convergence and collapse, to power geometries and accessibility landscapes, with excursions to centralized decentralization, splintering, and standardization, geographers have implicated media quite multifariously in the reworking of spaces. Activities and encounters are contextualized in more and more complicated ways as media reconfigure spaces. Both the infrastructure and the social forces building and funding infrastructure participate in a differentiated, relational space. Yet so long as geographers still show communication systems on maps that are drawn in accordance with standard cartographic projections, the absolute concept of space is used to visualize relational spaces. Infrastructure is built, as well, in a kind of space where linear distance still matters economically and practically. The simultaneous insertion of activity in absolute and relational spaces is a workable model of the human condition and highlights the tension between spaces of mobility and spaces of communication. Many questions arise again in response to other quadrants. How do concepts of place and privacy vary in relation to levels of
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connectedness? How does compression or convergence of time-space and cost-space in a media network work to enhance or inhibit public debate? What kind of place images arise out of and help to sustain a centralized or decentralized communication infrastructure? How is the topology of an infrastructure network related to the social network topologies it can support? Such interests point us toward the final and most elusive corner of the quadrant diagram.

VI Spaces-in-media
Of the four quadrants this is the least familiar although we live in it as much as in the others. An epistemological framework to study this quadrant is only beginning to appear, but we can already point to a group of related ideas topologies of communication, social networks, virtual places, surveillance, and code-space. These various concepts converge around the idea that communications are a kind of space that is, a structured realm of interaction that both enables and constrains occupants in particular ways. This idea can be traced from works in philosophy of language all the way to theories of digital telecommunication. For linguists who support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, linguistic differences lie at the root of differences in perception and behavior (Whorf, 1956; Sapir, 1983; Vygotsky, 1986). The concept of linguistic relativity, and hence of language as a form of container or boundary, are of course more deeply rooted in Western philosophy: Platos cave is a space constituted in and by the language(s) we speak. Heideggers concept of language: Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells (Heidegger, 1977 [1947]) resonates with Lacans view of the unconscious as linguistically structured insofar as language inhabits us and we in turn inhabit language and the wall of language is no less confining than its material counterparts (Lacan, 1966, 1981). People consciously or unconsciously speak in ways that align them with a particular group

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as insiders, while simultaneously placing the speaker outside spaces dominated by the tongues of Others. Thus talk and talking are central to the production of most everyday spaces and what you speak is where you are (Valentine et al., 2008: 384, 385; see also Pred 1990). Geographical processes such as imperialism have therefore depended on the creation of discursive networks with particular routes and nodes (Lester, 2002). There is consequently a potential to excavate a historical geography of spaces in language reaching back to the earliest oral spaces and evolving through the development of writing and subsequent media (Adams, 2009: 1328). We can follow in the footsteps of Adrian Mackenzie and turn from the earliest to the latest media. The diffusion of new media helps bring about powerful dynamics of belonging, participation, separation, and exclusion typical of contemporary network cultures (Mackenzie, 2009: 1295). Mackenzie described the dynamic created by the boxed labyrinth of software, codes, and hardware of wireless communication which: is a relatively invisible, messy, amorphous, shifting set 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-inmedia can be read as extended metaphors, but geographers are beginning to recognize that software can, quite literally, make space. Code beckons into being sociospatial relations that are dependent on the effective operation of software (Dodge et al., 2009: 1285). An international business headquarters or a grocery store checkout lane serves to illustrate the idea of code/space, where a particular space fails to function if for some reason the associated code becomes unusable. In other cases code merely augments the form, function, and meaning of a space, or lingers in the background as a potential element of space, for example in freeways with automated billing systems that obtain an identification signal from devices installed in passing cars (Dodge and Kitchin, 2005). Similar ideas

were previously articulated in regard to mass communications in terms of flowmations and spaces of transmission (Luke and O Tuathail, 1998; see also Morley and Robins, 1995). Communication is therefore a social process implemented by technologies and particular languages/codes, but also a spatial process creating spaces of inclusion and exclusion. As a further example, we can consider the communicational dynamics of the D/deaf1 since deafness is a type of social marginality that arises directly from embodied aspects of the ability to communicate. At the level of language, inclusion/exclusion of the D/deaf depends on the development of sign languages formal, shared, and fully nuanced gestural languages such as American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL). The formalization of, and teaching of, languages for the eyes rather than the ears mark a linguistic shift towards treating those with hearing impairment as fully competent persons with special characteristics rather than marginalizing them as defective speakers, yet at the same time these languages draw them into a social network space inaccessible to many of the hearing (Baynton, 1998). Inclusion and exclusion also arise from institutional responses to deafness. Legal frameworks such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) and the UKs Disability Discrimination Act (1995) require businesses and local governments to guarantee access and hence inclusion for the deaf and the hearing impaired. A very different institutional response is the creation of Deaf Professional Happy Hour (in the USA) or Deaf clubs (in the UK) which are periodic signlanguage based social gatherings ephemeral spaces for the Deaf which exclude those who do not speak sign-language (Valentine and Skelton, 2007). Finally, technological responses to hearing impairment include a video relay system (VRS) which is not only an institutional response but also a technological response. It depends on access of the Deaf to a videophone technology, which is a relatively recent
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innovation at least at a practical level, combined with government funded sign-language translators. Here technology assists in the inclusion of speaking and signing persons in a single social space, but it incorporates technologies like the ordinary 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 communication are created through a combination of inclusion and exclusion by languages, institutions and technologies. Other groups such as immigrants and racial, religious and ethnic minorities have also been excluded and included in very particular ways by languages, institutions, 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 cutting across the quadrants. How are social spaces of inclusion and exclusion reflected in place representations? How does the distribution of infrastructure in space arise from and contribute to inclusionary and exclusionary processes? Insofar as particular spaces of inclusion and exclusion exist in media what effects do they have on practices in place? So issues connected to spaces-in-media weave across the other three quadrants.

Figure 2. The quadrant diagram opened up to investigations between the polar oppositions
Source: Authors diagram

rather than stasis, a less dichotomous approach may be required.


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

VII Transcending the dichotomies


The generative potential of any taxonomy lies not so much in the affinities it suggests as in the betweens it helps to identify. We are cautioned to be critical of dichotomies, to envision thirdspaces (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 in a dialectic of spatiality (Giddens, 1984; Harvey, 1990), one seems always to end up dominating the other so we should be cautious of space/place and content/context. If we seek to inspire change
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Insofar as it is sometimes difficult to maintain the space/place distinction or the content/context distinction without the vague hand gestures spotted by Latour we perhaps need to rethink what might lie at the center of the diagram, suggested by all of the studies discussed here yet somehow missed by all of them, as well. Rather than a set of four quadrants, we can think instead of a field whose corners are defined by intersecting oppositions but whose middle remains a mystery (Figure 2). The question mark indicates an area open to investigations which move away from assumptions of scale that always creep into the space/place dichotomy as well as the presumptions of causality that

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underlie the content/context dichotomy. While some geographical critiques of scale are prone to substitute the horizontal for the vertical (Marston et al., 2005; Jones et al., 2007), or to replace 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 actualized as temporary often mobile sites in which the social unfolds (Marston et al., 2005: 423). Latour argues that computer-mediated communication does not cause individuals to be constituted in and by networks, but rather it works to make visible what was before only present virtually, namely the fact that for human beings competency comes in discreet pellets or, to borrow from cyberspace, patches and applets, whose precise origin can be Googled before they are downloaded and saved one by one (Latour, 2005: 207). To be an actor is therefore always to enact oneself as a traceable gathering since what seems to be the self is derived from various not-self elements, and media are nearly always mediators rather than intermediaries, in other words translators rather than conduits (Latour, 2005: 40). Competence is a matter of having the right plug-ins and people can be described as being amoebas having a star-like shape because their competencies are both internal to the 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, discusses the ways in which animals are mobilized (Whatmore, 2002: 3557). A brochure promoting ecotourism may employ an image of an elephant as a means of capturing the interest of potential ecotourists. The elephant body is translated into a photographic image on paper, which is translated into international flows of people and money, then into a volunteer-based ecological data-collection system, then into scientific reports, and finally into government policies. But finally is only a useful way to end this

sentence. The network goes on. Elephants circulate as virtual bodies in another set of paths linked more circuitously to the first: the genetic data supporting captive breeding programs (flows of names, dates, and elephant semen) and in quite different flows supporting various types of habitat creation (public discussions regarding the quality of animal enclosures in zoos). Whatmores work demonstrates that what is mobilized or translated in an actor network goes beyond conventional uses of communication. Every body (human and animal) circulates through translations only some of which fit the definition of communication yet all of which are interlinked, simultaneously folding or pleating space and place (Whatmore, 2002: 56; Deleuze, 2006). Thus communication includes not only shared conversations but also semiotic-material technologies (Whatmore, 2002: 159; see also Haraway, 1991: 192). These concepts of hybridity, translation, and actor networks may be understood as alternatives to the space/place and content/context dichotomies. They suggest that if a Cartesian space seems to be staked out by the more established perspectives, our thought processes are not in fact stuck to this two-dimensional surface. The question mark at the center opens up a new terrain for geographers interested in following the actors wherever they may go and however they may be translated. It is too early to guess whether this will become more important than the rectilinear analytical space it destabilizes and troubles. What is clear, however, is that communication is at least as important in these folded or pleated spaces/places as in the contained and containing spaces/places discussed previously.

VIII Conclusion
Peter Gould suggested rather pugnaciously that communication should be seen as Something that is shared everything from a kiss to an international shipment of grain (Gould, 1991: 3). But if everything that moves is communication,
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and at some point everything moves, then the geography of communication has an unlimited scope. It therefore requires a few guideposts. I have worked to show where these might be. Are we interested in what a particular text or discourse 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 these alternatives make sense, we may be looking at communications associated with translations, hybridity, actor networks, horizontality, and a flat ontology. In this case, communications are no longer seen as arcs between here and there or this and that; they instead become integral to the here-ness and there-ness, this-ness and that-ness of boundless selves (Adams, 2005). It may be that the best way to answer a question involves moving between the corners. What at first seems to be a simple matter of measuring the acceleration of data flow between point A and point B becomes, with the introduction of the second corner a question of how social topologies evolve in and through such connections. Likewise, a study may start by noting the importance of a place image in the media, for example the politicized image of the US-Mexico border, but on further consideration the border in the media becomes multiple borders embedded in myriad living rooms, offices, cars, and so forth. We may even envision a peculiar kind of study that engages with one corner of the quadrant before or after moving to the transcendent ANT-space at the center. This would be a departure from the vision of coherence that informs current geographical studies but it would deal with 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 place images affect peoples willingness to build the infrastructure and topological networks that
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channel and diffuse communication? When do social networks and their communication topologies stimulate communication infrastructure development 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 communication links? How does language of bias and discrimination, whether mobilized by strong or weak actors and in central or peripheral places, exploit the unevenness of communication infrastructure? What kinds of bias and discrimination can be overcome by the proliferation of communication infrastructure and what kinds require other responses? How is subjectivity altered as processes and forms of agency move from one kind of social and experiential context to another, that is, from spaces to places to communication infrastructures to network topologies? The relationships between space, place, and media indicated here incorporate views that seem to be diametrically opposed. We are helped by the concept of heterarchy (Bondarenko, 2005) whereby something might be contained but also at the same time be a container. Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift can be credited with bringing the idea of heterarchy into geography (Amin and Thrift, 2005), but, as is often the case, art and literature anticipated this insight. Heterarchic views of space and place are indicated most strikingly by the enigmatic short stories of Jorge Luis Borges (1962) and the impossible spaces depicted in the etchings of M.C. Escher. These paradoxical worlds in verbal and visual media were not wholly fantasies; they mirrored the worlds that we as communicators and actors actually inhabit where every container is contained by what it holds and 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 literature and begin to recognize many more of the compelling geographical questions raised by media and communications.

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Note
1. The capitalized term Deaf indicates a stronglybonded subordinate group that has developed an oppositional 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).

Acknowledgements
My thanks to Professor Andre Jansson at Karlstad University for his invitation to write this article, albeit for a different journal, and my thanks to the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their constructive comments and suggestions which led to substantial improvements.

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