Telecommunications and the Changing Geographies of Knowledge Transmission in the Late 20th Century

Abstract

Recent innovations in telecommunications and computing, enhanced by a global wave of deregulation and the emergence of post-Fordist production regimes, have unleashed profound transformations of various service sectors in the global economy. This paper first reviews the geographical repercussions of the explosion of information services, including the birth of electronic funds transfer systems, the growth of global cities and the dispersal of back offices to low-wage sites across the globe. Secondly, it explores the political economy and spatiality of the largest of these systems, the Internet. Thirdly, it summarises how the global division of labour has recently engendered the birth of 'new information spaces', places whose recent growth is contingent upon the introduction of telecommunications, citing as examples Singapore, Hungary and the Dominican Republic.