Time-space (de)compression

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Time-space compression (David Harvey 1989 and 1990) describes how in the modern world we have become increasingly able to expand our temporal understanding both of the past and of the present, on both local and global scales. A David Harvey (1990) quotation helps do not make it clear how Space and Time are social constructs:

"Durkheim pointed out in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915) that space and time are social constructs. The writings of anthropologists such as Hallowell (1955), Levi-Strauss (1963), Hall (1966) and, more recently Bourdieu (1977) and Moore (1986) confirm this view: different societies produce qualitatively different conceptions of space and time.” (David Harvey (geographer) 1990:418)

Historically the increasing popularity and accessibility of maps, journals, books and other printed material have allowed people to have a glimpse of thoughts and experiences of people from other cultures, cities, countries and even continents; this has increased people’s social and therefore temporal understanding both of the world and of people in different parts of the world today and historically. In turn, this general temporal understanding has led to an increase in general intelligence, this intelligence has reached the point where today in the western world the university degree has become so common that post-graduate studies have to be taken up in order for an academic to make him/herself stand out from the crowd when seeking employment. English is the international language of aviation, the language that air-traffic controller’s world-wide use to communicate with commercial pilots; this symbolises how our world is becoming globalised, and how localities are losing their own culture to a global culture (globalisation). Brutt-Griffler (1998) confirms a theory of Widdowson (1997:135) about the increasing popularity of the English language internationally: “English has spread and changed to become an international language” (Brutt-Griffler 1998:381).

The increasing use of the English language internationally can be theorised through ‘time-space compression’ as a phenomenon where local cultures are being taken over by David Harvey (geographer)’s (1989) ‘global village’, and local languages, such as Gaelic , are declining almost to extinction. This is one of the detrimental effects brought on through ‘time-space compression’. When reading about ‘time-space compression’ many deliberate variations to the term can be found, this has been part of the contribution to the debate. David Harvey (geographer) is a Marxist and this comes across in his work. It is in his studies and development of Marx’s (1857:524) ”annihilation of space by time” that he decided that the term ‘compression’ fitted best into the theory and so it is important at this early stage in the study to look at why he chose that word:

“I mean to signal by that term processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves. I use the term ‘compression’ because a strong case can be made that the history of capitalism has been characterized by the speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us. The time taken to traverse space and the way we commonly represent that fact to ourselves are useful indicators of the kind of phenomena I have in mind. As space appears to shrink to a ‘global village’ of telecommunications and a ‘spaceship earth’ of economic and ecological interdependencies – to use just two familiar and everyday images – and as time horizons shorten to the point where the present is all there is (the world of the schizophrenic), so we have to learn how to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression of our spatial and temporal worlds” (David Harvey (geographer) 1989: 240)


The term ‘time-space compression’ also describes how the world has become seemingly smaller (as illustrated in Harvey’s plate) as a result of a number of different technological influences (David Harvey (geographer) 1989:240). Kern (2003) introduces ‘Time-Space compression’ as a ‘transformation of life and thought’. In his introductory paragraph Kern (2003:1) lists what makes this transformation during the period of his study, which is between 1880 and 1918:

“Technological innovations including the telephone, wireless telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile, and air-plane established the material foundation for this reorientation; independent cultural developments such as the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, and the theory of relativity shaped consciousness directly.”

Kern tells us what were, in his opinion, the foundation causes of ‘time-space compression’, listing specific innovations from his period of study.

Similarly Adams (1995:268) refers to communication and transportation technologies in his analysis of ‘time-space compression’: “The development of communication and transportation technologies and their associated institutions implies a shrinking world with expanding opportunities for extensibility”

Now that we have briefly looked at the foundation of the theory allow me to pull us away from the start of the 20th century and look at developments since then. David Harvey (Geographer) (1989:293) describes how television, has had an effect by bringing international events into our living rooms:

“Mass television ownership coupled with satellite communication makes it possible to experience a rush of images from different spaces almost simultaneously, collapsing the world’s spaces into a series of images on a television screen. The whole world can watch the Olympic Games, the World Cup, the fall of a dictator, a political summit, a deadly tragedy … while mass tourism, films made in spectacular locations, make a wide range of simulated or vicarious experiences of what the world contains available to many people. The image of places and spaces becomes as open to production and ephemeral use as any other.”

This is the type of temporal reality that ‘time-space compression’ speaks of, the ability to share an event with the world in real time, rather than through a chain of messages or word of mouth. The media, although generally criticised for certain journalistic tactics and bringing violence into peoples living rooms, is an entity that we simply cannot live without anymore. It has even got to the point where we watch reality television programmes such as ‘Big Brother’ or ‘I’m a celebrity… get me out of here!’ in order to be entertained by the fact that these people do not know what is going on in the ‘real’ world. Their world, although on the same planet with the same biology and topography as ours, is completely changed because they have not got telephones or televisions and they do not know what is going on in the rest of the world. In Big Brother it is very difficult to keep track of the date when in the house, because every day is referred to as a number, “Day 13 in the Big Brother house” etc. I tried to search the Big Brother archive website to find what day the 7th of July (London bombings) was, and simply could not find any reference to it. This demonstrates how different the contestants’ world is without the media, they did not share in the national grief that the rest of the country shared in on the days following those tragic events despite actually being in Southern England. Television, it could be argued (Adams 1992:117), is gathering its own sense of ‘place’ at a great speed.

It is very difficult to list everything that has had an effect on our temporal world which can be described as ‘compression’, we have already seen Kern’s attempt from his period of study, now let us look at Harvey’s (1989) attempt in the following paragraph:

“Innovations dedicated to the removal of spatial barriers in all of these respects have been of immense significance in the history of capitalism, turning that history into a very geographical affair – the railroad and the telegraph, the automobile, radio and telephone, the jet aircraft and television, and the recent telecommunications revolutions are cases in point” (David Harvey (geographer) 1989: 232)

Harvey lists many of the same innovations that Kern later chose as influences from his period of study. But Kern did not include the television or the jet-aircraft, or ‘recent telecommunications revolutions’ in his study because they simply did not exist in the time of that study.

It is important that we do not just take what David Harvey (Geographer thinks for granted, it is not necessarily fully correct. There has been great debate over the term compression which has been changed to ‘expansion’ or even ‘production. As part of the debate Dodgshon (1999) states:

“…the time-gains produced by increasing ‘time-space compression’ lead to the exclusion of time savings from particular instances of social process, thus freeing time for use or colonisation in other ways. There is a sense in which more time is being gained or released as a resource, whilst more space is being used or bound as a resource.” (Dodgshon 1999:609)

Dodgshon is here summarising a similar idea to that of Gregory’s (1994) ‘time-space colonisation’. Giddens (1990:53) states that time and space in the modern world is not an easy thing to comprehend:

“Living in the modern world is more like being aboard a careering juggernaut rather than being in a carefully controlled and well-driven motor car”

In his book he terms the phrase ‘time-space distanciation’ to describe how modern society has made places socially distant from one another.

Doreen Massey (geographer)’s (1993) views on ‘time-space compression’ are more real and look more at the global picture of ‘time-space compression’. In this Marxist-style quotation Massey asks us to imagine that we are looking at the world through eyes at a Godly or Heavenly level:

“Imagine for a moment that you are on a satellite, further out and beyond all actual satellites; you can see ‘planet earth’ from a distance and, rare for someone with only peaceful intentions, you are equipped with the kind of technology that allows you to see the colour of people’s eyes and the number on their number-plates. You can see all the movement and tune-in to all the communication that is going on. Furthest out are the satellites, then aeroplanes, the long haul between London and Tokyo and the hop from San Salvador to Guatemala City. Some of this is people moving, some of it is physical trade, some is media broadcasting. There are faxes, e-mail, film-distribution networks, financial flows and transactions. Look in closer and there are ships and trains, steam trains slogging laboriously up hills somewhere in Asia. Look in closer still and there are lorries and cars and buses and on down further and somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa there’s a woman on foot who still spends hours a day collecting water.” (Doreen Massey (geographer) 1993:61)

The meaning I understand from Massey’s use of the word ‘still’ in that last line is that even though the western world has become seemingly smaller, and traversing the globe has become far easier, sub-Saharan Africa and other poverty stricken areas where people of the western world have no reason or need to go to still seem like they are on a separate planet. She also explains how ‘time-space compression’ is led by some westerners but can imprison others:

“These are the jet-setters, the ones sending and receiving the faxes and the e-mails, holding the international conference calls, the ones distributing the films, controlling the news, organizing the investments and the international currency transactions. These are the groups who are really, in a sense, in charge of ‘time-space compression’; who can effectively use it and turn it to advantage; whose power and influence it very definitely increases. On its more prosaic fringes this group probably includes a fair number of Western academics. But there are groups who, although doing a lot of physical moving, are not ‘in charge’ of the process in the same way. […] there are those from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Caribbean, who come halfway round the world only to get held up in an interrogation room at Heathrow. Or again, there are those who are simply on the receiving end of ‘time-space compression’. The pensioner in a bedsit in any inner city in this country, eating British working-class-style fish and chips from a Chinese take-away, watching a US film on a Japanese television, and not daring to go out after dark. And anyway, the public transport’s been cut. Or – one final example to illustrate a different kind of complexity – there are the people who live in the favelas of Rio; who know global football players like the back of their hand, and have produced some of its players; who have contributed massively to global music; who gave us the samba and produced the lambada that everyone was dancing to a few years ago in the clubs of Paris and London; and who have never, or hardly ever, been to downtown Rio. At one level they have been tremendous contributors to what we call ‘time-space compression’; and at another level they are imprisoned in it.” (Doreen Massey (geographer) 1993:61-62)

Massey is basically saying that although, to some people, the effects of ‘time-space compression’ are to reduce the temporal size of the world; to others it actually does the opposite. This, along with other contributions to the debate, gives me enough academic evidence to be able to research into whether time-space de-compression actually does exist in the world. In studying such a vast subject, with as open a title as I have chosen, ‘time-space (de)compression’, it is important to realise at an early stage that I will not be able to cover everything in this comparatively short text. I have chosen then to focus on the use of telephony and the internet as part of that infrastructure, how that has had an effect similar to that which Harvey describes, and how the opposite can also be true, that without telephony, the world can feel seemingly larger.

Contents

[edit] The theoretical influence of telephony

“The telephone is an irresistible intruder in time or place, so that high executives attain immunity to its call only when dining at head tables. In its nature the telephone is an intensely personal form that ignores all the claims of visual privacy prized by literate man.” (McLuhan 1964:271)

As stated at the end of my previous chapter I have decided to concentrate on the first of Kern’s ‘technological innovations’: the telephone. Kern (2003:214) speaks of a life changing early telephone:

“The ‘annihilation of distance’ was not a science-fiction fantasy or some theoretical leap of physicists; it was the actual experience of the masses who quickly became accustomed to an instrument that enabled them to raise money, sell wheat, make speeches, signal storms, prevent log jams, report fires, buy groceries, or just communicate across ever increasing distances.”

The telephone, although used for different uses than it is today, made it possible for the first time to share emotions over a long distance in real time. It is argued by Stein (2001:114) that telephone usage did not become as widespread as quickly as Kern makes out in the above quotation. Writing of Cornwall’s experience of the beginning of the telephone revolution Stein states:

“…in the case of new communications technologies there was a significant time lag between the introduction of an innovation and its widespread social diffusion.” (Stein 2001:114)

News had previously travelled either by telegram or through word of mouth prior to that but the innovation of the telephone made it possible to speak with someone a great distance away and to hear what they really sounded like. However it was not available to everyone, at first only the more elite in society could afford to use one.

Some felt that the ability to hear someone’s voice from far away was not necessarily a good thing:

‘Proust felt both a sense of closeness and separation from telephone conversations. In a letter of 1902 he related how he had spoken to his mother just after she lost her parents, and “suddenly her poor shattered voice came to me through the telephone stricken for all time, a voice quite other than the one I had always known, all crackled and broken; and in the wounded, bleeding fragments that came to me through the receiver I had for the first time the dreadful sensation of all things inside her that were forever shattered”’ (Kern 2003:215, quoting Marcel Proust )

Proust’s feelings are something I can completely relate to; during the time I was studying for my dissertation I lost my grandmother. She died very suddenly at home whilst I was in Aberystwyth. She died as I was waking up in Aberystwyth and by the time my father called me with the news I had already been through my morning routine and had just sat down at my desk to work. What struck me was that his voice sounded very different to how it usually sounded, although I was unable to see him, I knew that he was upset. The rest of my day was even more strange, as once the phone call was over I was left seemingly on my own in my room in Aberystwyth, completely away from my family and feeling very lonely. The feeling of losing someone dear to you over a great distance is not a good one, and to hear the news over the telephone, although completely unavoidable, is also not a very nice thing to go through. I felt that this created a temporal frame of mind similar to that which I was studying, time-space de-compression. Distance was no object in me receiving the news through innovations in technology, this is Proust’s ‘closeness’, but Newport became seemingly more distant than ever because I wanted to actually be there straight away. Unfortunately due to train cancellations and bad weather I was unable to travel back home either by train or by road, therefore furthering my bad experience with time and space, this is Proust’s ‘separation’.

Fischer (1992:86) writes of a telephone that is very widespread by that time: “Today, few American households lack a telephone”. She backs up her claim historically by showing maps of how telephone usage grew and spread across the USA between 1907 and 1927. However, as quoted at the opening of this chapter, McLuhan (1964) believes that the popular telephone has started to become an intrusion on almost everybody’s personal and work lives.


Green (2002) similarly thinks telephones are life changing, she opens her work stating that they have the potential to transform everyday time and space:

“The current explosion in mobile telecommunications and computing technologies provides the potential to transform “everyday” time and space.” (Green 2002: 281)

Jon May and Nigel Thrift (2001) confirm the importance of the telephone in the theory of ‘time-space compression’:

“… this innovation was also of considerable importance in reshaping people’s understanding of space. For example, within cities a still largely localised telephone network greatly altered a sense of privacy, shattering both the geographical and to some extent the social distance between users and raising new anxieties as to its proper use. At the national and regional level, and prefiguring similar debates towards the end of the twentieth century, as places appeared to be moving ever closer together so concerns were raised as to the uniqueness of place whilst internationally the experience seems to have been both a progressive shrinking of the world and its simultaneous enlargement as people became aware of events in ever more distant parts of the world.” (May and Thrift 2001:8)

Green (2002), Pool (1977) and Townsend (2001) have each written about the telephone’s effects on time and space. Green (2002) writes of how their sole purpose is to enable social communication at a distance:

“Their sole function is to support social communication at a distance, and their ability to collapse distance has made possible many spatial features of contemporary urban life. The office towers of late modernity, for example, could not exist without the telecommunications technologies to co-ordinate their internal spaces” (Green 2002: 283)

Friedland and Boden (1994:15) briefly touch on how telecommunications have become influential on an international scale well into the 1990s:

“In 1990, for example, Miss Italy was chosen in real time on television by telephone, Orthodox Jews around the United States constituted themselves into a constitutional yeshiva and were studying Gemara by phone, and in 1991, bowing to inevitability, the Vatican opened international telephone lines so that the world’s 875 million Roman Catholics can dial in to hear the Pope’s latest message. More urgently, during the recent Gulf War, French war photographers bypassed the “pool” censorship imposed by the Pentagon by beaming their photos to their London office via portable Hasselblad satellite transmitters. More recently, both the Russian revolution of 1991 and the tragic Yugoslavian civil war have seen extensive use of electronic mail networks and cellular technologies both to get news to the West and to provide limited news internally.”

Today the telephone is very different to how it was in the period Kern writes about. We have touch tone or digital telephones which connect almost instantly without the need for an operator. The costs of using the telephone both domestically and internationally have also seen similar reductions to those I cited Harvey stating in my previous chapter about air travel. One telephone call provider, One.tel , is currently advertising a price of £17.74 a month for a landline, this includes line rental using BT infrastructure and free UK calls at any time. This is a typical offer and there are others which are available everywhere on the market at the moment. I remember having to keep phone calls short because we were paying per minute and even today sometimes my father will tell me to get off the phone because I am costing him money. In fact it does not cost any more to use the phone or not use the phone, it is the infrastructure that you are paying for now rather than a service provided as was previously the case. On a recent trip to London I was using the London Underground when I spotted an advert for Alpha Telecom. The advert featured a coloured man and the words ‘Alpha telecom’s low rates to Saudi Arabia bring my family closer than ever’. I tried to contact Alpha Telecom on many occasions by telephone because I wanted to feature that advert in this work. I felt that the advert summed up just how much the telephone affects our temporal world. Even though the effect of ‘time-space compression’ is still controlled by how much it costs to use it, in the case of international calls, this advert was giving the impression that as prices are lowered accessibility is increased to the service. Therefore the world becomes seemingly smaller due to that service. Unfortunately I was unable to get through to the correct department in order to get a copy of the advert and the marketing campaign had seemingly ended by the time of my next journey to London a few months later.

I could not possibly do a study on modern day telephone usage without referring to a crucial commodity within our modern society, the internet. Most westerners use the internet both at home and at work to use email, to check the news or to search for an item that would be of interest in a piece of work they are doing. People do their grocery shopping on the internet, some do their Christmas shopping and others play computer games with people on the other side of the world. The World Wide Web is a great network of servers connected internationally through physical lines, mostly provided by large telecommunication companies such as AT&T and British Telecom. It is also the same telephone infrastructure provided by such companies that make the internet available to the general public.

I would like to make reference to a famous online auction website called eBay. What I find interesting about eBay is that, because traders from all over the world can use it, they have had to re-standardise time so that it is clear when auctions are going to end. They have done this by renaming the local time zone of the servers to “eBay time”. See Figure 2.2 for an example of this.


On 23rd October 1998 Swatch, the Swiss watchmaker, also recognised the influence of the internet and how confusing the 24 time zones of the world were. They announced the creation of a new unit of time called the ‘beat’, equivalent to 1 minute 26.4 seconds. The idea was that internet sites would base their calendars on the global beat system, with a new meridian in Biel, Switzerland. This created a new time zone launched on that day called Biel Mean Time (BMT), Biel (coincidentally the place of Swatch’s headquarters) being the place where the day at 000 beats would start. The fact that both a popular website and an international watch manufacturer are able to attempt to standardise time into their own ‘global’ time zone shows how reliant many some people, and even large corporations, have become on the internet, which in turn is completely reliant on telephone infrastructure.

I am not going to write a great deal more about the different things people can do using the internet because the uses and possibilities are literally endless, but it is that in itself that has made the internet so important in our society. Students and academics have become heavily reliant on its use for research and for downloading lecture notes, and also for sending emails rather than making telephone calls or posting letters (snail mail as it is referred to in the internet world). Use of email or private messaging systems such as MSN messenger has made it possible for people from all over the world to send and receive messages instantly.

The CIA’s World Factbook states that there were 34.898 million landlines in operation in the United Kingdom in 2002; in the same year they state that there were 25 million internet users. These figures show just how dependent our culture, and probably our economy, has become on the telephone invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, in reducing our temporal experience of time and space.

[edit] Methodology - Limitations, Methods and Sources

Limitations

So far I have briefly summarised what ‘time-space compression’ is (Chapter 1), I have then written about how the telephone is a key innovation that contributes to our temporal understanding of time and space. As I have already stated in this study, it would be impossible for me to make a detailed study of time-space de-compression that covers every aspect of the theories coming out of the ongoing debate in a study limited to 10,000 words. I have stated that I am going to study one technological innovation amongst many. It is important to note also that with the telephone the experience of ‘time-space compression’ is in the present only and only affects our temporal understanding of the past through hearing people’s accounts or by reading articles on the internet. For this reason I know that I will not be able to make full conclusions on time-space de-compression. I will, however, make this a study of our over-reliance on the landline telephone infrastructure. There are currently 1,800,000,000 mobile phone customers globally and so it is important to note at this stage of the study that my study is only on the effects of the landline telephone and will not include the ever increasingly popular mobile telephone. Some would say that inefficiencies in the landline are less detrimental today because of the ever increasing popularity of the mobile telephone. Although I acknowledge the use of mobile phones, the landline telephone remains more reliable (in my experience) than its mobile equivalent as it does not rely on signal strength and terrain does not affect the signal sent through the cable to such a degree as it affects radio waves used by mobile telephones. Also, landline telephone lines are needed in order to be able to access the internet. Although WAP is available on mobile telephones its use is very limited, not only by the amount of text that can be on a screen at one time, but also by the fact that the content made available is very limited. The emergency services still encourage the use of landline telephones for emergency calls because they are more reliable and fewer calls are lost. It is possible to get an exact address for a landline subscriber instantly, whilst it can take a few minutes to track the location of a caller using a mobile phone signal if the caller is unable to give an accurate location for the incident (according to a call handler at Dyfed-Powys Police Operations Room, Carmarthen). The reasons given above are why this study of landlines is still relevant in a society that is becoming increasingly dominated by the mobile phone.

Methods and Sources

As stated in my data report, I spent some time during this period of study at the BT Archives in London. My reason for going to the BT Archives was that BT (previously General Post Office and then British Telecommunications) were for many years the only providers of landline telephones in the UK. In some areas they still are the only providers whilst in other areas ‘cable’ telephone and television companies such as NTL have provided an alternative service. I found the BT Archives staff to be very helpful, but the service itself is under resourced. I felt that, by the end of my research, I had become more of an expert in photocopier repair than I had in submarine cables. I went there in order to research into the reliability of submarine cables on an international scale but once I got there I soon found other sources that became more interesting to me. The sources I found were deeply buried in archive boxes which lacked a good referencing system or index and so I spent a lot of time trawling through boxes only to find 2 examples. Therefore I am going to comment in this study on the 2 case studies that I found amongst the archive files in London, as well as to comment on my own experiences of getting a telephone line installed in Aberystwyth, Ceredigion (an area where only BT can provide telephone lines). I have since used two databases in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth (NLW) to find articles that refer to the case studies found at BT archives. These databases are: ‘The Times Digital Archive’ and ‘UK NewsStand’. I will also comment on two further cases (1966 and 2004) which I found in those databases in NLW.

This piece of work relies mostly on historical studies and also on academic literature found in NLW rather than work done over the summer months at BT archives. I have sourced many academic articles and books that contribute to the debate on David Harvey (geographer)’s (1990) term ‘time-space compression’ and Marx’s ‘annihilation of space by time’. These sources provide most of my evidence in this piece of work. Some books (e.g. David Harvey (geographer) 1989, Kern 2003) have paragraphs specifically referring to the telephone; these have already been cited earlier in the work. There are also some studies available that look specifically at our use of telephones.

Through the three historical case studies, along with a modern case study and my own modern day experiences I hope to be able to prove that a temporal expansion of distance occurs when telephone infrastructure is not available to us.

[edit] Case studies

As previously discussed, case studies are a fundamental part of this study because it is through them that I can ascertain whether temporal expansion of distance actually occurs when infrastructure is not available to us. The first case study I will cite is that of telegraph cables being cut during the Spanish – American war. The case study come from a report published by the General Post Office in 1899 entitled ‘Submarine cable communication in time of war: Incidents of the Spanish-American war’.

1898 – Cable Cutting at war

The report cites an article from The Morning Leader on May 20, 1898 as stating

“… America will understand that there is the growing establishment of an international law that a belligerent has power to cut the cable between his enemies and neutral shores. On this understanding there is nothing to hinder America from cutting the cables from Santiago de Cuba, and so isolating the island” (General Post Office 1899)

This article occurred during a debate as to what power belligerent states had to cut communications from enemies to other states. The wording chosen by The Morning Leader ‘and so isolating the island’ is very interesting in this study because it proves that cutting of such cables can be seen as limiting communication and therefore limiting the understanding of what is going on outside of the state.

In fact, cutting the correct cables seemed to be the main problem for the Americans in their attempt to isolate the enemy:

“… whatever may have been the explanation, the Santiago – Jamaica cables were in point of fact never interrupted; and, as the cables cut along the coast of Cuba were either local connections or pieces of old cable which had been abandoned, communication between Havana and Madrid via Santiago remained undisturbed to the end” (General Post Office 1899)

The fact that belligerent states were cutting cables became an element and indeed a weapon in itself during the war. The Times is cited in 1898 as saying:

“It is stated in official circles that the Government has decided, if the cable from Cuba is cut by the Americans, to send some auxiliary vessels to cut all the cables landing in the United States Territory” (The Times 1898)

This shows just how protective the Spanish were over the cables that provided Cuba with basic communication and demonstrates the international effects that cable cutting had during wartime.

1929 - Telephone exchange fire

In 1929, the Daily Express reported about a telephone exchange fire. The headline was ‘No telephones for a week’ and the subtitle: ‘2,000 subscribers cut off after fire ’. I found this very interesting whilst I was going through the archives at BT because it was the only newspaper report that I found there which they have kept, showing a time when things have gone wrong, out of wartime. I found it hidden in a file dedicated to the submarine cables between Ireland and London, the article itself was glued onto the same sheet as a major story about the plan to lay cables, but other than that no attention was drawn to it. I assume that it was simply spotted by the same archivist that found the other story in the same paper, and so he/she simply added it onto the same sheet. The article shows the detrimental effects that a lack of telephone infrastructure had on the public in the area. The most telling line of the story for me is:

‘Orders are being sent by hand to the shops, and women are doing their own shopping. Even the fire and police stations are cut off … Nearly 2,000 subscribers are affected’ (Daily Express 1929)

When I looked for other accounts of the same incident I found an article in The Times (1929) which reports ‘Fire at telephone exchange: Girl Operators’ Courage’ . This is more of an account of what happened at the time of the fire rather than demonstrating the effects that no telephones have on locals, but I find the article interesting in helping to make the chain of events clearer:

“The Sidcup and Chislehurst Telephone Exchange was damaged by fire on Saturday [10th August 1929] and put temporarily out of action. A rubbish heap which was on fire in a garden adjoining the exchange spread rapidly and the flames soon reached the walls. Part of the room fell in, two rooms were gutted, and considerable damage was caused by water. A quantity of books and documents were saved, but some plant was destroyed. Six girls in the switch-room displayed great coolness, and remained at their posts as long as possible. An official statement issued last night states that all possible steps are being taken to restore the service, but as a new switchboard will have to be installed a few days must necessarily elapse before communication is fully restored. Meanwhile a number of circuits of general utility (such as fire, police, hospital, and call offices have been connected temporarily with adjoining exchanges.” (The Times 1929)

Before I read these articles I had no idea just how similar the dependence on the telephone was in 1929 to it is today. The article shows us that this was still in the age of operator connected calls yet people were relying on the telephone in order to do their shopping.

1966 – Company sues for cut cable.

Whilst researching in The Times digital archive I found a piece about a company that was taking legal action against McAlpine engineers in 1966 because they had accidentally smashed a junction box and cut Arlington Books Ltd’s telephone connection. The book company claimed that the disruption to the telephone service had lost them £350 in business, and so were suing for £400 for negligence.

“Firm sued over cut cable A book publishing firm said at Westminster County Court yesterday that they were without a telephone for three weeks in the middle of the Christmas trade two years ago because a cable had been cut during demolition work. “We had just published a cookery book by Mrs. McKee, the Queen’s cook, and lost heavily on its sales because we could not do business”, Dr Desmond Elliott, a director of Arlington Books Ltd, of Duke Street, S.W., told Judge Herbert. The firm claimed £400 against Sir Robert McAlpine and Son Ltd., civil engineer, of Park Lane, W., alleging negligence. Mr. Ian Davidson, their counsel, said that a junction box in Jermyn Street was smashed by a load of rubble, and a telephone cable was cut. Mr. Elliott said he estimated he had lost about £350 in business.” (The Times 1966)

Although I do not know the outcome of the case, I find this article fascinating because it gives us our earliest account of disruption to a business as a result of telephone cable damage. It shows us how important telephones were to trade in the 1960s.

2004 – Telecommunications tunnel fire in Manchester

In March 2004 a fire in a telecommunications tunnel underneath Manchester cut 130,000 telephone lines. The Times (2004a) and The Daily Post (2004) reported the story. The Times article states the adverse affects that this fire had locally and its effect on other areas of the UK.

“Telecoms fire brings business to a halt Phones fell silent across Manchester, computers idled in screensaver mode and e-mail traffic slowed to a standstill yesterday after a fire in a cable tunnel destroyed telephone lines. Thousands of office workers in the city’s business quarter arrived for work to discover that their computers were down and phone connections were out of action. Major businesses in the city dependent on customer service, such as Barclaycard and CIS, hurriedly instituted contingency plans, rerouting telephone queries to call centres around the country. Police designated it a major incident. The radio network linking Greater Manchester Ambulance control with crews was cut and paramedics had to rely on mobile phones. A spokeswoman for the service said that it was under “extreme pressure” because of the disruption. Callers across Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Derbyshire also complained that their services were disrupted. The fire broke out at 3.20am in an unmanned service tunnel 100ft below ground that carries BT cables between Manchester and Salford, connecting 130,000 homes and businesses to the national telephone network. The Manchester Chamber of Commerce is contemplating a rash of compensation claims, notably from telesales companies complaining that they have lost up to half of their daily revenue.” (The Times 2004a)

A few days after the fire Peter Jackson from the Journal in Newcastle-upon-Lyne wrote of how the fire had made him realise how much of an effect technology has had on his life. He compared the fire with the fact that his washing machine had broken down only a few weeks before in his article entitled ‘Hi-tech can leave us feeling washed up’.

“As technology advances, we frequently become its slaves as much as its beneficiaries. [It] builds us up and then knocks us down. We forget the old ways of doing things. This was reinforced earlier in the week when a fire in a 66ft deep tunnel carrying phone and electricity cables somewhere in Manchester cut the telephone lines of 130,000 homes and businesses. One of those businesses was responsible for my broadband connection and, as a result, I have been without email for the last two days. And without email I have been bereft. Who would have thought that something that was only just becoming common about six years ago would have so quickly assumed such a vital role. I have had to resort to the fax machine, which I don’t remember ever having been such a hassle. Now it seems like the telecommunications equivalent of popping down to the laundrette with a heavy suitcase. I have to make telephone calls, and wait, on hold, listening to Greensleeves. But it does bring home the importance of having a plan, some back-up, some contingency arrangements for when technology fails us. What would we do in the event of a power failure such as London suffered, or, God forbid, a terrorist outrage. There have been plenty of case studies, from the Manchester IRA bombing to the Twin Towers, which show that these events can have a catastrophic effect on business. The fact is, the more sophisticated our systems become, the more vulnerable we become and we need to be prepared for the worst.” (Jackson in Journal 2004)

Chris Robinson of The Times reported along the same lines as Jackson with regard to needing to be ready for crises later that year. In an article entitled ‘We never close whatever the crisis – the business show must go on’ Robinson describes what little planning the businesses affected by the fire earlier in the year had put in place in case of another such event.

“Direct Response, a contact centre operator, polled more than 1,000 companies in the Manchester area shortly after a fire in a cable tunnel beneath the city cut off 130,000 telephone lines. Businesses across the city, including 160 call centres with up to 16,000 staff, were left without phones, broadband or faxes for several days. Mobile phone networks were jammed and emergency services communications affected. Shockingly, only a third of the firms polled had a disaster recovery plan in place, despite their recent experience. Three-quarters of the organisations polled said they would lose sales calls if the phones went down again. Nearly a fifth estimated that they would lose more than 100 calls a day.” (The Times 2004b)

This relatively small fire in 2004 just happened to be in the wrong place, and its effects were catastrophic, so much that the Police classed it as a major incident. Because of over-reliance on the telephone network Ambulance control had to change the way of its operation temporarily, and many businesses lost money. I recently spoke with a GP from Manchester during a train journey; he told me that during the few days when the telephone network was unavailable he was unable to access his own patient’s medical records as they were all on the local NHS network, and that some prescriptions of special-order medicines were delayed because pharmacies were unable to order the drugs. The effects of losing telephone connections for only a few days could have easily cost an innocent citizen their life because government agencies (Police and NHS) were unable to operate properly.

2004 and 2005 - Having a telephone line installed

This case study is the whole reasoning for my first thoughts about time-space de-compression. In September 2004 I moved into private accommodation in Aberystwyth for a year. The house that my housemates and I chose had no telephone line installed, and therefore no provision for internet access. Apparently previous tenants had taken the 5 minute walk to the Old College in order to use workstations when internet access was required but the landlady, when asked, was happy enough for us to have a line with broadband fitted at our own cost. We decided that the cost of having a line installed and paying for line rental and broadband was negligible compared to the inconvenience of having to go to a workstation room in order to use the internet. This was especially the case as two out of four of us were computer science undergraduates and so their reliance on the internet for their studies was all the more important than for the other two. When I contacted BT to organise for a line to be installed I was told that an appointment could not be booked for a September installation until the first of August. I therefore waited until then to place my order. I ordered the line to be installed on the day after the first of us moved into the house. When that day came, the engineer arrived on time but found that the pole our line was to be connected to was structurally unsafe. He could not install the line that day as he did not have a crane to do it but he agreed to proceed with all the work that was required on the inside of the house. Then the engineer with the crane could simply connect the line to the existing infrastructure the next day. Although I was allocated a telephone number, I was unable to order a broadband connection because Virgin.net, the broadband provider, had to do line checks before an order could be placed. These line checks would not work until the line had been physically connected. I was also aware that even after placing a broadband order I would have to wait a further 10 to 14 days for broadband to be connected. Seven days and numerous phone calls later the engineer with the crane arrived and connected the line and then I was able to order the broadband which was connected on time without any further problems. On my return to university accommodation in Pentre Jane Morgan this year I decided to do a little experiment especially for this dissertation research. The start of this is detailed in my data report. I noted upon moving into the student house that a phone line was already in place I presumed that it would not take much effort to reconnect it and that no engineer appointment would be necessary, so I decided to phone BT to organise for it to be reconnected. I was amazed at the response, on October 5th, when I telephoned I was told that the earliest date I could be reconnected was 1st November 05. On that day no engineer called but the line was duly connected obviously from the exchange. This proved inefficiency with BT for me because it was obvious that the only work necessary was possibly a flick of a switch or a small amount of exchange rewiring, this could have been done much earlier than the 1st of November, but BT’s protocol had to be followed and I had to wait for this basic necessity.

[edit] Effects of de-compression

The reason that I chose this topic originally was because my temporal understanding of distance during the time that I had no telephone was so blinkered by that lack. I struggled because the internet was not as accessible to me as it had been in university halls during the previous year. When I was in a lecture later that semester about technological innovations and their effects on time and space, all I could think of was that time and space altered also when the telephone was not available. Indeed, modern day students in the western world have become overly reliant on the internet. The reason this is so interesting to me is that it ties in so well with my own experience.

In the University every now and then the email servers or internet servers break down or are shut off for maintenance. This means that, even if only for an hour or two, students and staff are unable to use the internet or to send or receive emails. For those two hours the university turns to complete chaos. In a tutorial recently Lowri Williams said “I don’t know how I could cope with my studies without the internet”.

It is impressive how this one innovation from the turn of the 19th-20th century can have affected so many people’s lives in the western world. I use the term western world because it is commonly understood that the western world is where such innovations have become part of common life, that is not to say that they do not exist in developing countries, just that the typical ratio of people with telephony equipment or televisions is significantly less, and therefore their experience of time and space is very much different to ours.

Technological innovations in themselves are not all of what Harvey discusses when introducing ‘time-space compression’; a major part of it is simply how we understand more of the world today than our ancestors did, and how our understanding goes a lot further now than it did only 150 - 200 years ago. However, as Lowri Williams said in the tutorial, our knowledge of the world today comes from many different sources, many of which are accessible via the internet. So if the internet, which I class as part of the term ‘telephony’ is not available, then our understanding of the world will develop at a slower pace than it does when we have the internet available to us.

The telephone line today has become as much a commodity as electricity or gas, we simply cannot function properly without it. Telephone infrastructure is used for telephone conversations, the internet, video conferencing, network links, automated panic alarms, faxes, pagers and so much more. If a similar fire to that in 1929 was to happen to an exchange today then the general order of that local area would become absolute chaos. Luckily, however, telephone companies have recognised this, and have begun to cash in on our over reliance on a stable telephone infrastructure. British Telecom offers different levels of response time to companies who need telephone infrastructure to be fixed at different priorities. Basically this means that you can pay a premium to BT and when telephone infrastructure goes down, a guaranteed response time is given, and massive compensation payments made if the infrastructure is not working within a certain amount of time. This does not however mean that disruption will never happen, because although exchanges today are all digital and are staffed minimally, the chances of fires and disruption therefore being reduced, there is still a chance of disruption as we saw in Manchester in 2004. In Manchester it took a few days for wires to be reconnected and during that time local people and businesses were flung into absolute chaos.

During my time at BT archives I also learnt that infrastructure is not as heavily reliant on underwater cables as I had originally thought. In fact, telecommunications traffic between the US and the UK is actually split between satellite and submarine cables, and both of those forms are capable of carrying 100% of the traffic. What this means is that if one of those two links became unavailable, then the other link would be able to take over the broken link’s traffic until the broken link can be regained. I read at the archives that the reason the satellite links were put in place was due to an increased threat of terrorism in the 1990s due to the over-reliance on the underwater cables. This ‘satellite-insurance’ is possibly what was needed at the time of cable cutting in Cuba, but of course that was before the space age when our temporal understanding of the world only went horizontally and not vertically.

In this chapter it is also important to note that it is not only a lack of telephone infrastructure that can cause a time-space de-compression with regards to the use of telephone. Accessibility can also be determined by how much it costs to use the telephone. Today we live in an age where it is cheaper than ever to make telephone calls, but sometimes these prices can be quite confused.

I would like to briefly look at One.Tel , an Australian based Telecommunication Company who offers telephone and internet services widely in the UK. They currently have a tariff called ‘StandardUKTalk Plan + International Caller’. It is quite strange that between the hours of 8am and 6pm Monday to Friday, a local or national UK call costs 2.7p per minute; however a call to the USA during those hours costs 2.0p per minute. This to me shows a small case of time-space de-compression. Someone ending a call to the USA must effectively adjust to the fact that the call they are about to make to the baguette shop around the corner to order lunch is actually going to cost more. This shows that telephone tariffs can confuse Harvey’s ‘compression’ theory, although it is also important that this case is not looked upon massively because the effect is actually only 0.7p per minute which to most is a negligible amount, especially when taken in light of tariffs in the past.

[edit] Conclusion

The main question to be answered in this conclusion is whether the brackets in ‘time-space (de)compression’ should remain? If they do, then that means that I cannot be sure of the existence of time-space de-compression. However if I am sure that it is possible for such temporal expansion to exist post-innovation then it is important that I make that clear and remove the brackets from the term. Time-space de-compression is not the first term devised contrary to David Harvey (geographer)’s original ‘time-space compression’. Dodgshon’s (1999) term ‘time-space expansion’, ‘time and space distanciation’ in Giddens (1990), and Kirsch’s (1995) term ‘time-space production’ are examples of terms that I have found whilst doing background reading for this work. They reflect the same kind of thought processes as I have been having about the theory, but each time speaking of different aspects of time-space production. In Dodgshon’s case he was referring to the fact that we have become increasingly aware of what has occurred in the past and that affects our understanding of space and time:

“We are now far more aware of other spaces and other times that are not the present space nor the present time (Turner, 1974, page 239). Set alongside each culture’s discovery of other world views, there is a strong and compelling case for the cultural and historical geographer to respond to this discovery of time by arguing that, experientially, we actually live in a world of time-space expansion, not compression, since we have greatly expanded our dimensionality as cultures.” (Dodgshon 1999:613)

And in Kirsch’s example he is speaking of “how the role of technology in the transformation of space is not limited to those globalizing processes through which the world has been increasingly interconnected in space and time” , he also calls the term ‘compression’ “ironic” (Kirsch 1995).

The main extract from Kirsch’s work that I found to this effect was:

“… I move to reconceptualize the relations between technology and space without the spatial metaphors which tend to cloud the picture. That is, through a theoretical analysis of the role of technology in the production of space, I seek to recover that space which has not collapsed through technological innovation, but rather has seemingly been lost in the process of representation.” (Kirsch 1995:531)

May and Thrift (2001) also raise doubts about the term ‘time-space compression’ in the introduction to their book on TimeSpace:

“… notwithstanding such widespread acceptance, we would point to a number of quite fundamental problems with the way in which accounts of ‘time-space compression’ usually proceed. Whilst drawing upon the more developed conceptual schema traced above gives rise to a quite different picture of those changes in the nature and experience of time and space usually associated with a period of ‘time-space compression’, we believe that this more nuanced account has implications for how we think about both ‘time-space compression’ itself and our understandings as to the making and re-making of TimeSpace more generally.” (May and Thrift 2001)

I have also heard references to time-space de-compression in the media. A BBC correspondent stated during the live airing of Concorde’s final landing at Heathrow: “Concorde lands for the last time and our ever shrinking world becomes just a bit bigger”. This demonstrated to me that by removing other innovations, Concorde being an innovation within commercial aviation, the world can again become seemingly bigger, in this case because it was no longer possible to arrive in New York earlier (in local time) than when you took off in London.

By looking at my own examples of the experiences of governments (1898) and civilians (1929, 1966, 2004 and 2005) it is clear that lack of telephone infrastructure does increase our temporal experience of space and time. This therefore contradicts the theory of ‘time-space compression’, it is something that cannot be disputed, it is fact. One.tel’s USA tariff compared to UK tariff cannot fit easily into Harvey’s theory either. However, not having a telephone line does only immediately affect our current experience of space and time primarily, we still have information handed down to us through the ages about other lands, other cultures, and we still have high levels of basic literacy in the western world. Not having basic telephone infrastructure does not affect other innovations which give us an experience of ‘time-space compression’ either, for instance we can still get into our cars, go on trains, aeroplanes and even rockets!

It is important that arguments are made for ‘time-space de-compression’ because it does occur in our temporal understanding of the current. When studied along with the stated writings by Dodgshon, Kirsch, May and Thrift, as well as what the BBC correspondent said live on air, I am confident that I have raised a valid question within the debate of ‘time-space compression’. However I conclude that the term time-space de-compression cannot be used alone because it simply is not wholly true. The only de-compression (or expansion) that occurs is temporary, and does not affect our overall understanding of the world. Although I have argued that the telephone is a major innovation that has contributed to ‘time-space compression’, to not have that innovation temporarily is simply not enough to be able to cause us to say that our temporal understanding of the world is reduced because it simply is not. In fact, on reflection, I would say that you could possibly take all of the innovations I have just mentioned away from us temporarily and our overall understanding of the world still would not change. It would make it more difficult to communicate and to traverse, but our existing knowledge would not be affected at all, and therefore the world, and our understanding of it, would still be seemingly a lot smaller than it was in the time of our ancestors. So the brackets in ‘time-space (de)compression’ must remain in this element of the interesting debate started by Harvey on ‘time-space compression’.

[edit] References (Categorised)

Academic Literature (22)

  • Adams, P.C., (1992) Television as Gathering Place. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82: 117-135.
  • Adams, P.C., (1995) A Reconsideration of Personal Boundaries in Space-Time. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85: 267-285.
  • Brutt-Griffler, J., (1998) Conceptual questions in English as a world language: Taking up an issue. World Englishes 17: 381 – 392.
  • Dodgshon, R.A., (1999) Human geography at the end of time? Environment and Planning D 17: 607-620.
  • Fischer, C. S., (1992) America Calling: A social history of the telephone to 1940. University of California Press: Berkeley.
  • Friedland, R., and Boden, D., (1994) NowHere: Space, Time and modernity. University of California Press: Berkeley.
  • Giddens, A., (1990) The consequences of modernity. Polity: Cambridge.
  • Green, N., (2002) On the Move: Technology, Mobility, and the Mediation of Social Time and Space. The Information Society 18: 281 -292.
  • David Harvey (geographer) (1989) The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Blackwell:Oxford.
  • David Harvey (geographer)(1990) Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80: 418-434.
  • Kern, S., (2003) The Culture of Time and Space, 1880 – 1918: with a new preface. Harvard:Cambridge (Massachusetts).
  • Kirsch, S., (1995) The incredible shrinking world? Technology and the production of space. Environment and Planning D 13: 529-555. Pion: London
  • Lee, H., and Liebenau, J., (2000) Time and the internet at the turn of the Millennium. Time & Society 9: 43-56
  • Marx, K., (1857) The Grundrisse. Published by Penguin in 1973.
  • Doreen Massey (geographer) (1993) Power geometry and a progressive sense of place [in] Bird (et al) (eds.) (1993) Mapping the futures, global change. Pgs 59-69. Routledge: London
  • May, J. and Thrift, N., (eds.) (2001) Introduction in May, J. and Thrift, N., (eds.) (2001) TimeSpace: Geographies of temporality. Routledge:London
  • McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The extensions of man. Routledge:London.
  • Monaghan, C. P., (1899) The Revival of the Gaelic Language. Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 14: xxxi-xxxix.
  • Pool (1977) The social uses of the telephone. MIT Press: Cambridge (Massachusetts).
  • Stein, J., (2001) Reflections on time, time-space compression and technology in the nineteenth century [in] May, J. and Thrift, N., (eds.) (2001) TimeSpace: Geographies of temporality. Routledge: London.
  • Townsend, A., (2001) Mobile communications in the twenty-first century city [in] Brown, Green and Harper (eds.) (2001) Wireless world: Social and interactional implications of wireless technology. Pgs 62-77. Springer Verlag: London
  • Widdowson, H., (1997) EIL, ESL, EFL: global issues and local interests. World Englishes 16: 135-146

Newspaper articles (8)

  • Daily Express, (1929) 17 August 1929. No telephones for a week: 2,000 subscribers cut off after fire. Daily Express: London
  • Daily Post (2004) 30 March 2004. Telephone lines down after fire. Daily Post: Liverpool (page 4)
  • Journal (2004) 1 April 2004. Hi-tech can leave us feeling washed up. Peter Jackson. Journal: Newcastle-upon-Tyne (page 32)
  • The Times (1898) 23 May 1898. Latest Intelligence: The War. The Times: London
  • The Times (1929) 12th August 1929. Fire at telephone exchange: Girl Operators’ Courage. The Times: London (page 7, column B)
  • The Times (1966) 27 October 1966. Firm sued over cut cable. The Times: London (page 12, column G)
  • The Times (2004a) 30 March 2004. Telecoms fire brings business to a halt. Russell Jenkins, The Times: London (page 2)
  • The Times (2004b) 4 November 2004. We never close whatever the crisis – the business show must go on. Chris Robinson, The Times: London (page 68)

Websites (4)

Government Reports (1)

  • General Post Office (1899) Submarine cable communication in time of war: Incidents of the Spanish-American war. General Post Office:London

[edit] References (Alphabetically)

  • Adams, P.C., (1992) Television as Gathering Place. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82: 117-135.
  • Adams, P.C., (1995) A Reconsideration of Personal Boundaries in Space-Time. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85: 267-285.
  • Brutt-Griffler, J., (1998) Conceptual questions in English as a world language: Taking up an issue. World Englishes 17: 381 – 392.
  • Central Intelligence Agency, CIA World Factbook http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/uk.html [Accessed 9 December 05]
  • Daily Express, (1929) 17 August 1929. No telephones for a week: 2,000 subscribers cut off after fire. Daily Express: London
  • Daily Post (2004) 30 March 2004. Telephone lines down after fire. Daily Post: Liverpool (page 4)
  • Dodgshon, R.A., (1999) Human geography at the end of time? Environment and Planning D 17: 607-620.
  • Fischer, C. S., (1992) America Calling: A social history of the telephone to 1940. University of California Press: Berkeley.
  • Friedland, R., and Boden, D., (1994) NowHere: Space, Time and modernity. University of California Press: Berkeley.
  • General Post Office (1899) Submarine cable communication in time of war: Incidents of the Spanish-American war. General Post Office:London
  • Giddens, A., (1990) The consequences of modernity. Polity: Cambridge.
  • Green, N., (2002) On the Move: Technology, Mobility, and the Mediation of Social Time and Space. The Information Society 18: 281 -292.
  • David Harvey (geographer) (1989) The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Blackwell:Oxford.
  • David Harvey (geographer) (1990) Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80: 418-434.
  • i-level.com. http://www.i-level.com/resource-centre/statistics.asp [Accessed 27 February 06].
  • Journal (2004) 1 April 2004. Hi-tech can leave us feeling washed up. Peter Jackson. Journal: Newcastle-upon-Tyne (page 32)
  • Kern, S., (2003) The Culture of Time and Space, 1880 – 1918: with a new preface. Harvard:Cambridge (Massachusetts).
  • Kirsch, S., (1995) The incredible shrinking world? Technology and the production of space. Environment and Planning D 13: 529-555. Pion: London
  • Lee, H., and Liebenau, J., (2000) Time and the internet at the turn of the Millennium. Time & Society 9: 43-56
  • Marx, K., (1857) The Grundrisse. Published by Penguin in 1973.
  • Doreen Massey (geographer) (1993) Power geometry and a progressive sense of place [in] Bird (et al) (eds.) (1993) Mapping the futures, global change. Pgs 59-69. Routledge: London
  • May, J. and Thrift, N., (eds.) (2001) Introduction in May, J. and Thrift, N., (eds.) (2001) TimeSpace: Geographies of temporality. Routledge:London
  • McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The extensions of man. Routledge:London.
  • Monaghan, C. P., (1899) The Revival of the Gaelic Language. Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 14: xxxi-xxxix.
  • One.tel http://www.onetel.co.uk/index.php?node=landline-tukt [Accessed 8 December 05]
  • Pool (1977) The social uses of the telephone. MIT Press: Cambridge (Massachusetts).
  • Stein, J., (2001) Reflections on time, time-space compression and technology in the nineteenth century [in] May, J. and Thrift, N., (eds.) (2001) TimeSpace: Geographies of temporality. Routledge: London.
  • The Times (1898) 23 May 1898. Latest Intelligence: The War. The Times: London
  • The Times (1929) 12th August 1929. Fire at telephone exchange: Girl Operators’ Courage. The Times: London (page 7, column B)
  • The Times (1966) 27 October 1966. Firm sued over cut cable. The Times: London (page 12, column G)
  • The Times (2004a) 30 March 2004. Telecoms fire brings business to a halt. Russell Jenkins, The Times: London (page 2)
  • The Times (2004b) 4 November 2004. We never close whatever the crisis – the business show must go on. Chris Robinson, The Times: London (page 68)
  • Townsend, A., (2001) Mobile communications in the twenty-first century city [in] Brown, Green and Harper (eds.) (2001) Wireless world: Social and interactional implications of wireless technology. Pgs 62-77. Springer Verlag: London
  • UCAS University Admission Figures for UK http://www.ucas.ac.uk/figures/archive/applications [Accessed 27 February 06]
  • Widdowson, H., (1997) EIL, ESL, EFL: global issues and local interests. World Englishes 16: 135-146