Intercommunications, Distance, and Geographical Theory

ABSTRACT

Each movement technology alters the effective distances among places by changing the effort required to move things, people, and information among those places. Intercommunications media (postal, telegraph, telephone, telex. and computer-mediated techniques) have had greater impacts on effort distances than any other movement technology.

Because they have not heretofore been examined carefully, the alterations of distance produced by intercommunications media have rarely been incorporated into geographical thinking. Geographical theory and analysis are impoverished by the failure of geographers to include the new ideas about distance and spatial interaction produced in intercommunications in their theory and their analytical models. Incorporating such ideas would enrich the discipline by making some of its most basic concepts more comprehensive and therefore more powerful.