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. When considered, communication has often been conflated with transportation, or been subject to quantification at the expense of sustained analysis of its implications for people and places. The increasingly central sociospatial concerns raised by new digital information technologies, 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 technologies, because of the visual representations in which they trade, allow social and human geography to incorporate study of communication without abandoning an empirical focus on the visible.