Crucially, then, the political economic perspective underlines that the development of
new telecommunications infrastructures is not some value-neutral, technologically pure
process, but an asymmetric social struggle to gain and maintain social power, the power
to control space and social processes over distance. As any investigation of, say, the
growth of global financial centres, or the extending global coverage of corporate
telematics networks will soon discover, power over space and power over telecommunications
networks go hand in hand. For example, Graham Murdock draws the
striking parallel between the `fortress effect' generated by many postmodern office
buildings, and the development of vast, private `dataspaces' on corporately controlled
networks. He argues (1993: 534) that `here, as in territorial space, continuous battle is
being waged between claims for public access and use, and corporate efforts to extend
property rights to wider and wider areas of information and symbolization'.
By demystifying, and unpacking, the social and power relations surrounding telecommunications
and the production of space, the political economic perspective does much
to debunk the substitutionist myths of technological determinism discussed above. It
allows us to reveal the socially contingent effects of new technologies, the way they are
enrolled into complex social and spatial power relations and struggles, and the ways in
which some groups, areas and interests may benefit from the effects of new technologies,
while others actually lose out. Thus, `the increased liberation and freedom from place as
a result of new mobility modes for some may lead to the disempowerment and relative
exclusion for others' (Swyngedouw, 1993: 322).
An excellent example of this is the current transformation of utility markets, under
pressures of competition and liberalization, and the experiences of consumers at different ends of the market (Graham, 1997b). On the one hand, affluent consumers will have
`smart meters' which use telematics to allow them to access supplies for many, distant,
competitors in a `virtual market' for energy, from the comfort of their own homes. On the
other, over 4 million poorer UK electricity consumers have already had their electromechanical
utility meters turned into electronic `prepayment' meters. These lock
consumers into one supplier and need to be `topped up' electronically before use,
necessitating a physical journey to the post office ± a major problem for many with
already poor mobility, health problems, and poor physical services.
Building on Giddens' (1990) work on time-space distanciation, Paul Adams (1995) uses
the concept of `personal extensability' to capture how a subject's (telemediated and
physical) access to distant spaces, services and places may allow him or her to extend his
or her domination over excluded groups and so support the production of divided
spaces and cities. `One person's (or group's) time-space compression', he writes, `may
depend on another person's (or group's) persistent inability to access distant places.' As
Adams states, `the variation of extensability according to race, class, age, gender, and
other socially-significant categories binds micro-scale biographies to certain macro-level
societal processes' (Adams, 1995: 268; see Massey, 1993: 66).
Thus, within cities, forms of `telematics super-inclusion' (Thrift, 1996b) emerge for eÂlite
groups, who may help shape cocooned, fortified, urban (often now walled) enclosures,
from which their intense access to personal and corporate transport and telematics
networks allows them global extensability. Meanwhile, however, a short distance away,
in the interstitial urban zones, there are `off-line' spaces (Graham and Aurigi, 1997), or
`lag-time places' (Boyer, 1996: 20). In these, often-forgotten places, time and space remain
profoundly real, perhaps increasing, constraints on social life, because of welfare and
labour market restructuring and the withdrawal of banking and public transport
services. It is easy, in short, to overemphasize the mobility of people and things in
simple, all-encompassing assumptions about place-transcendence (Thrift, 1996c: 304),
which conveniently ignore the splintering and fragmenting reality of urban space.
To Christine Boyer (1996: 20), the highly uneven geography of contemporary cities,
and the growing severing of the `well designed nodes' of the city from the `blank, inbetween
places of nobody's concern', allows fortunate groups to `deny their complicity'
in the production of these new, highly uneven, material urban landscapes. But perhaps
the most extreme example of the complex interweaving of new technologies, power
relations, and the production of space and place comes with the small, eÂlite group who
run the global financial exchanges in world cities. Here, we find that `the extensible
relations of a tiny minority in New York, London, and Tokyo, serve to control vast
domains of the world through international networks of information retrieval and
command' (Adams, 1995: 277).