Time-Space Compression

10 Key excerpts on "Time-Space Compression"

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  Making Globalisation

  • Robert J. Holton(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Much of this is associated with the idea of time–space compression within global processes developed by David Harvey (1996). Following Le Goff (1980) and Landes (1983), Harvey links globalization of time and space with the dynamics of capitalist globalization which are thought to underlie this process of compression. New technologies linked with the capitalist organization of production and exchange both speed up temporal aspects of life and reduce spatial barriers to economic activity. These processes have been going on for a number of centuries. In the time dimension they are associated with the much more common use of the minute and second from the 17th century onwards, together with an intensified time-conscious regime of industrial employment and work discipline. In the spatial dimension they are asso-ciated with technological changes in transportation and communication that reduce spatial barriers to communication and exchange. This process has been dramatically intensified with contemporary information technology enabling the transfer of any information capable of being digitalized across national borders. This has become a vital feature of global finance markets, news services, and multimedia transfers, as well as inter-organizational and inter-personal communication. As time-based processes speed up and spatial barriers are eroded, time–space becomes, as it were, compressed into shorter periods Globalization and the Transformation of Space, and Time 83 operationally across global space. In one sense this may be referred to as ‘the annihilation of space by time’ (Harvey 1996: 241). Nonetheless, this does not usher in the end of geography because space remains a crucial dimension of social life. Rather particular forms of space–time are now deployed in new geographies of power.

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  Emerging Approaches to Educational Research

  Tracing the Socio-Material

  • Tara Fenwick, Richard Edwards, Peter Sawchuk(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Compression is basically the notion that the world feels smaller, and in an important sense is smaller, as more people, goods, information and services are now able to travel around it and communicate across great distances much more quickly and easily than was previously the case. With compression comes the sense that things have speeded up and possibilities for detached dwelling reduced. Seclusion and detachment from the social order becomes more difficult. However, the process of compression is itself one of uneven development, as there have been periods and places of greater compression than others. Lefebvre’s (1991) popular analytical framing of space as lived, perceived and conceived provides a convenient heuristic for exploring this phenomenon, as particular spatial arrangements are argued to emerge from their lived experiences, practices and representations. Probably the most systematic attempt to chart this process of compression from the Enlightenment is to be found in the work of Harvey (1989), which situates globalization and space–time compression within the current restructurings of capitalism. Here it is the search for increased profits and social discipline on a global scale under conditions of enhanced competition for goods and services that effects change. Drawing on a neo-Marxist framework, Harvey argues that the crises in capital accumulation at various stages in the history of capitalism have resulted in the disruption of established patterns of spatial arrangements and their continual reordering around new centres and forms of production

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  Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World

  The Telegraph and Globalization

  • Roland Wenzlhuemer(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The dematerialization of information flows and its impact on the structure of global communication space provides an excel- lent example. This development (as well as its modern-day equivalent encapsulated in technologies such as the Internet or mobile telephony) has traditionally been referred to as a classic example of ‘time–space compres- sion’. This is, however, an inaccurate or at least highly incomplete descrip- tion of the process. Space has not been compressed. At best, one particular form of space – communication space – has been restructured, and in the course of this some actors and objects have moved closer together (or have been compressed) while others have moved further apart. The same is true for time as only some spaces are functions of time. At best, we can conclude that some spaces – for instance global communication space – have been partially compressed, while others have not. Chapter 5 will explore in some depth how, with the emergence of the submarine telegraph network, global communication space moved fur- ther and further away from geographic space in the late nineteenth cen- tury. It will be seen that, from a relative perspective, the so-called ‘compression of time and space’ applied only to certain well-connected The annihilation of time and space? 47 parts of the world, while other parts remained relatively remote. If, how- ever, we want to fully understand the socioeconomic and cultural signifi- cance of the transformation of communication space, the structures of other spaces must be borne in mind and related to this process. Below, a very brief example is provided to illustrate exactly how different spaces can interact with each other. It will be shown how the understanding of space put forward in this book can help in analysing the effects of changing connectivity patterns on different levels. After several aborted attempts, a transatlantic telegraph cable eventually connected the United Kingdom and Newfoundland in August 1858.

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  Time-Space Compression

  Historical Geographies

  • Barney Warf(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In the 1960s, the shrinking world was a popular theme among technocrats such as Daniel Bell and Alvin Toffler, who approached the topic from the perspective of “post-industrial” society, the decline of manufacturing, and the rise of an information-based service class. Bell (1960: 22), for example, contrasted spatial accessibility in 1789, when the Constitution was signed, with 1960: “The real change of scale between 1789 and today, has to do with the number of persons each of us knows and the number each of us know of—in short, the way in which we experience the world.” Technocratic views of communications were widely promoted by Marshall McLuhan (1962, 1967), whose enormously influential works portrayed a progression from the limited spatiality of preindustrial societies and orality as the dominant form of communication to the influence of printing to the global networks of modern telecommunications. Each age, he maintained, saw a dramatic increase in the scale of human extensibility. McLuhan (1964: 4) gave particular importance to the electronic media, famously arguing that “the world has become so compressed and electrically contracted, so that the globe is no more than one village.” This rosy, utopian view, with its impoverished sense of politics and inequality, nonetheless spoke to the profound Time-Space Compression that telecommunications unleashed and decisively entered popular consciousness on the subject.

  Technocratic theorizations of Time-Space Compression, informed primarily by technological determinism, tended to present space and time as lying outside of social relations, and ignored or minimized the social inequalities and power relations that the process inevitably entails. Because it is fundamentally an expression of power, Time-Space Compression is always uneven among groups and places, or, as Adams (1995: 268) argues, “One person’s (or group’s) Time-Space Compression may depend on another person’s (or group’s) persistent inability to access distant places.” Increasingly, it became evident to many observers that absolute notions of space were inadequate to represent this process accurately, leading to tentative attempts to theorize space in relational terms. Forer’s (1978) early paper on “plastic space,” for example, stressed the role of different transportation technologies in the folding of different geographies. An empirical example of relational space is found in Muller (1984), who describes the non-Euclidean “elastic space” of Canada as it is stretched by different types of transport networks, forming differential surfaces of accessibility. Elucidating the causes and consequences of plastic/ elastic space, however, required a whole new paradigm, one that took social relations seriously.

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  Global Dimensions

  Space, Place and the Contemporary World

  • John Rennie Short(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Reaktion Books

    (Publisher)

  13 All global networks have to overcome space and time. Indeed, the defeat of these fundamental elements constitutes a global system. We can identify significant relationships between what we can term space–time convergence and globalization. Space–time convergence is the reduction of the time taken to move between places. In 1800 it took a stagecoach almost three and half days to travel from New York to Boston. By 1860 the same distance could be covered in 10 hours by train, and, in 2000, in less than five hours by car, assuming no traffic jams. Transport improvements brought New York and Boston closer together. In the first phase of globalization, space and time constituted major barriers to global integration. Distance could be overcome, but at a cost. Messages passed slowly and unreliably; information was received late, orders could be delayed. The time taken to cover distance imposed costs. A global economy was possible, but its full elaboration was hampered by distance, time and cost. Places were still far apart from each other. The second phase of globalization is closely connected to major space–time convergence brought about by the canals, railways and steam-driven ships. These transport improvements reduced the time and hence the cost of sending people, goods and information. We can think of them as compressing space–time: transport improvements bring places closer together in a space–time convergence. Before the opening of the Erie Canal, it could take several weeks to move goods from New York City to upstate towns and cities. When the Canal opened in 1825 , the cost of trans-porting goods was so radically reduced that new goods were put on canal barges. A headline in a newspaper published in upstate Batavia could relish the fact that fresh Long Island oysters were now available. The canal 160 G L O B A L D I M E N S I O N S compressed time and space and hence introduced new commercial oppor-tunities, new connections, a new world.

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  Reading Economic Geography

  • Trevor J. Barnes, Jamie Peck, Eric Sheppard, Adam Tickell, Trevor J. Barnes, Jamie Peck, Eric Sheppard, Adam Tickell, Trevor J. Barnes, Trevor J. Barnes, Jamie Peck, Eric Sheppard, Adam Tickell(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Reacting against the all-encompassing and overgeneralized concepts of the “global village” and “time–space compression,” Scott Kirsch (1995, p. 544, emphasis in original) argues that “by resorting to the rather cartoonish shrinking world metaphor, we lose sight of the complex relations . . . between capital, technology , and space, through which space is not ‘shrinking’ but rather must be perpetually recast.” Perhaps the clearest exploration of how telecommunications become woven in to the production of new geographical landscapes of production, consumption, and distribution at all spatial scales comes from Eric Swyngedouw (1993, p. 305). THE END OF GEOGRAPHY OR THE EXPLOSION OF PLACE ? 343 Building on the work of Harvey (1985a), he argues that every social and economic activity is necessarily geographical. It is “ inscribed in space and takes place ” (empha-sis in original). Human societies “cannot escape place in the structuring of the prac-tices of everyday life” (p. 305). Within an internationalizing economy, capitalist firms and governments must continually struggle to develop new solutions to the tensions and crisis tendencies inherent within capitalism, between what David Harvey calls “fixity” and the need for “motion,” mobility and the global circula-tion of information, money, capital, services, labor, and commodities (Harvey, 1985a). Currently, such tensions and crises arise because increasingly widely dis-persed areas of production, consumption, and exchange, befitting of the interna-tionalizing economy, need to be integrated and coordinated into coherent economic systems. Space thus needs to be “commanded” and controlled, on an increasingly international scale.

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  Computing Geographically

  Bridging Giscience and Geography

  • David O'Sullivan(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • The Guilford Press

    (Publisher)

  Time geogra- phy was first presented by Torsten Hägerstrand (1970) in near-complete form, with a few additional concepts added in a later paper (Hägerstrand, 1982). For many years prior, Hägerstrand worked on diffusion models (Hägerstrand, 1968, the translation of the Swedish original published in 1953). 6 Diffusion necessarily focuses attention on movement, whether of people or things or ideas, and time geography is principally concerned with how things in motion are able (or not) to interact with one another across time and space. Central to the appeal of time geography is its inclusion from the outset (see Hägerstrand, 1970) of a compelling visu- alization framework, the space-time diagram, sometimes referred to as the space-time aquarium. Good overviews of the essentials have been provided by Thrift (1977a) and Dijst (2009). It is easy to get distracted by space-time diagrams 7 and lose sight of the ideas behind time geography. The key concepts are space-time paths and constraints. Individuals (whether persons or things) follow a contin- uous path in space-time, such that at any given moment they must be at a particular, singular location. 8 Central to time geography is the notion that social life can be investigated in terms of how multiple paths relate to one another in space-time. Interrelations among space-time paths are governed by constraints, which Hägerstrand groups into three categories: capability constraints, coupling constraints, and authority constraints. Capa- bility constraints relate to the ability of an individual to traverse space 6 This work was a significant influence in the early years of the quantitative revolution (Mor- rill, 2005), and Hägerstrand himself was also instrumental in ensuring the publication of Bill Bunge’s Theoretical Geography (1962). 7 See the next subsection, where I lean into the distraction.

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  Time, Media and Modernity

  • E. Keightley(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  29 This acceleration continued with the increased rapid circulation of goods and information, signalled most strongly through the extension of the railway with its standardisation of time attesting to ‘the progressive subjugation of space by time’. 30 This went in parallel with the development of new ways of thinking about time in many fields of thought, including physics, psychology, music and the arts. 31 From this Leccardi asks whether the current epoch, given that acceleration appears to be a feature of societies for at least 200 years, can be rightly characterised as involving only the further acceleration of time. De-temporalisation of the present in relation to the decontextu- lised space is a feature of networked time. But, argues Leccardi, this is not inevitable: in response to these processes are political movements such as the anti-globalisation that provide a form of resistance: In this context the political community is temporalised: the global sense of belonging together materialises through a non-reified time and space. At their heart the planet is profiled like a dynamic system of interconnected spaces and times that have ahistorically sedi- mented temporality and spatiality. 32 Yet although this and Hassan and Purser’s work is seminal in suggest- ing we need to take further our analysis of the digital and globalised implications of time, their focus is primarily still networked cultures, the implications of the network for time rather than the broader issues associated with digitality. 33 For approaches that offer something yet more nuanced, it is neces- sary to turn away from media theory and reach further afield to phi- losophy and to human computer interaction and mathematics.

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  The Political Economy of Communication

  • Vincent Mosco(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  From a political economic perspective, globalization refers to the spatial agglomeration of capital, led by transnational business and the state, that transforms the spaces through which flow resources and commodities, including communication and information. The outcome is a literal transformation in the geography of communication and information that accentuates certain spaces and the relationships among them. For example, the New York–London–Tokyo axis anchors a map of communication and information services, which extends secondary connections to Frankfurt, Shanghai, and Los Angeles, and so on, to form a network grid of worldwide linkages. Like any map, it cannot be drawn with absolute precision (Jessop, 2000). New York’s place on the grid does not extend to the entirety of the city but includes lower Manhattan, the center for financial services, mid-Manhattan, where we find the headquarters of communication and entertainment conglomerates, and parts of the outer boroughs and suburbs. Communication and information technology expand the range of locations that can link people to the wealthy core of the city, but they also intensify the importance of the core because, at the center, one not only has direct access to the technology, but also to the principal people and organizations that have the power to constitute the network of flows. According to Agnew (2001: 52–3), the world has become “a complex mosaic of inter-linked global city-regions, prosperous rural areas, resource sites, and ‘dead lands’ increasingly cut off from time–space compression.” These transformations create hierarchies of control over which the term globalization can serve as a mystifying gloss. In other words, the practice of globalization creates new hierarchical networks of power. But the myth of globalization submerges these unpleasant realities beneath utopian visions of a flat world, a network society, and, most utopian of all, the end of geography (Mosco, 2004).

  This mythology grows partly out of a deep resistance to the view that space, and not just time, is dynamic, that what we map, whether physical space, political space, or the space of human communication flows, is constantly changing (Massey, 1992; Winseck and Pike, 2007). The choice of the term spatialization is precisely intended to underscore the process of constant spatial change, which geography has documented over the range of configurations of absolute space, time–space, cost–space, social space, and cultural space. The process, popularly referred to as globalization, identifies today’s patterning of spatial change. It does not signal a flat world or the end of geography. The departure which fuels the mythology is the real expansion in the ability of those people and organizations with the power to command political economic resources to make greater use of time and space as resources by altering the space of flows to their benefit. It starts from the political economy of capitalism, which constitutes the process of re-zoning spaces, in part, by stratifying and concentrating the power to do so along class, race, and gender lines. As Fuchs (2007: 74) puts it, “These spaces are not inclusive, open and participatory, but segmented, exclusive, centralized and hierarchic. To speak of the network society is an ideological construct that obscures capitalist relations and structural inequalities that shape contemporary society.”

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  Exploring Human Geography

  A Reader

  • Stephen Daniels, Roger Lee(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  22 ‘Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination'

  Reprinted in full from: Annals of the Association of Geographers 80, 418–34 (1990)

  David Harvey

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315832555-22

  The question I wish to consider is the construction of a historical geography of space and time. Since that sounds and indeed is a double play on the concepts of space and time, the idea requires some initial elaboration. I shall then explore the implications of the idea in relation to the historical geography of everyday life and the social practices of those who call themselves geographers.

  The spaces and times of social life

  Durkheim pointed out in The elementary forms of the religious life (1915 ) that space and time are social constructs. The writings of anthropologists such as Hallowell (1955 ), Lévi-Strauss (1963 ), Hall (1966 ) and, more recently, Bourdieu (1977 ) and Moore (1986 ) confirm this view: different societies produce qualitatively different conceptions of space and time (see also Tuan, 1977 ). In interpreting this anthropological evidence, I want to highlight two features.

  First, the social definitions of space and time operate with the full force of objective facts to which all individuals and institutions necessarily respond. For example, in modern societies, we accept clock time, even though such time is a social construct, as an objective fact of daily life; it provides a commonly held standard, outside of any one person’s influence, to which we turn again and again to organize our lives and in terms of which we assess and judge all manner of social behaviors and subjective feelings. Even when we do not conform to it, we know very well what it is that we are not conforming to.

  Second, the definitions of objective space and time are deeply implicated in processes of social reproduction. Bourdieu (1977

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