ON THE MARGINS - THE INVISIBILITY OF COMMUNICATIONS IN GEOGRAPHY

Though a few geographers have made communication the object of study, communication has been undertheorized by Angle-American geographers. W hen considered, communication has often been conflated with transporta tion, or been subject to quantification at the expense of sustained an alysis of its implications for people and places. The increasingly cen tral sociospatial concerns raised by new digital information technolog ies, however, suggest the urgency for the discipline to re-evaluate a reluctance to engage with communication processes that, until lately, because of their relative invisibility, may have seemed naturalized or beyond the disciplinary purview. Ironically, new communication techno logies, because of the visual representations in which they trade, all ow social and human geography to incorporate study of communication wi thout abandoning an empirical focus on the visible.