TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND THE CHANGING GEOGRAPHIES OF KNOWLEDGE TRANSMISSION IN THE LATE 20TH-CENTURY

Recent innovations in telecommunications and computing, enhanced by a global wave of deregulation and the emergence of post-Fordist producti on regimes, have unleashed profound transformations of various service sectors in the global economy. This paper first reviews the geographi cal repercussions of the explosion of information services, including the birth of electronic funds transfer systems, the growth of global c ities and the dispersal of back offices to low-wage sites across the g lobe. Secondly, it explores the political economy and spatiality of th e largest of these systems, the Internet. Thirdly, it summarises how t he global division of labour has recently engendered the birth of 'new information spaces', places whose recent growth is contingent upon th e introduction of telecommunications, citing as examples Singapore, Hu ngary and the Dominican Republic.