The Incredible Shrinking World? Technology and the Production of Space

Abstract

This paper is about the role of technology in the transformation of space, and the ways in which these changes are represented. These processes are explored principally through critical analysis of the work of Harvey and Lefebvre; more specifically, I contrast the place of technology as expressed through their varied emphases on the annihilation of space, and the production of space. The dramatic restructuring of space and time in recent decades, associated with new high-speed geographies of production, exchange, and consumption, has been theorized against the backdrop of a ‘shrinking world’, The popular conception of the world shrinking to a global village is generally seen as the product of technological advances in telecommunications, transportation, and ‘information’. For Harvey, these innovations arc seen as the means through which capital has freed itself from spatial constraints. By placing the ‘collapse of space’ jargon alongside Marx's phrase, the annihilation of space by time, these spatial metaphors serve Harvey as shorthand for the complexities of time-space compression; the shrinking world is seen as a midpoint between a regime of accumulation and a mode of representation. I argue that, although these metaphors help to theorize the relativity of space—as the global impinges on the local—they only do so by obfuscating the relative space of everyday life, and the increasingly technical means through which it is produced. Through an interpretation of Lefebvre's discussion of technology in The Production of Space, I suggest how the role of technology in the transformation of space is not limited to those globalizing processes through which the world has been made increasingly interconnected in space and time. So too, technology has been critical to the domination of conceived space over lived space as social relations are spatialized at the scale of experience. As a foundation for these arguments, the social relations of technology and technological change are theorized through the incorporation of ideas from the social studies of science and technology and from critical human geography.