Representations in an Electronic Age: Geography, GIS, and Democracy

Abstract

The slow, uneven decline of these interlinked certainties, first in Western Europe, later elsewhere, under the impact of economic change, “discourses” (social and scientific), and the development of increasingly rapid communications, drove a harsh wedge between cosmology and history. No surprise then that the search was, so to speak, for a new way of linking fraternity, power, and time meaningfully together. Nothing perhaps more precipitated this search, nor made it more fruitful, than print-capitalism, which made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways (Anderson, 1983, 36).