Telematics: Identifying the New Geographies of Digital Communication

Abstract

The mutable relationships between telematics technologies and social change, encompassing the different ‘communication spheres’ of satellite television through to home phone use, are processes that continually produce new understandings of time and space. This has lead to simultaneous growth in what has been called ‘new geographies’. These new geographies exist on and through different scales of temporal, spatial, historical, economic and social ‘strata’. It is these ‘strata’ of new telematics geographies that the authors intend to identify and map as part of this current research project, and within this paper the authors will offer a general examination of the research methods used and results achieved thus far.