GeoMedia

Theoretical Perspective

While communication scholars analyze the symbolic verbal, nonverbal, and mediatized aspects of human experience, geographers create and/or analyze representations of how places and spaces are created. The two fields appear thus distinct. However, areas within each discipline have gradually converged as the critical and cultural, spatial, and mobilities turns in the humanities and social sciences have challenged a priori assumptions of representation.

For communication and media scholars, this means rethinking the transmission model of communication, which is predicated on a simplistic linear flow of content from a source through a medium to a receiver. This is due to both the multimedia effects of contemporary culture, which has ushered in what Jean Baudrillard refers to as privileging the simulacrum of the hyperreal, and a rethinking of how the original authorship or rhetoric of traditional, humanistic subjects communicate with others through reason alone. Many communication and media theories emphasize continual feedback loops between sources and audiences as well as posit how publics are constituted through power and ideology. Furthermore, distinctions between the private and public spheres have effectively collapsed due to the rise in new communication technologies and the interactive hub of social media networks.

It is equally important to recognize that the study of geography should not be confused with cartography alone. Cultural geography, in particular, challenges the authority of designating boundaries in the material world and examines how people and institutions spatially create landscapes that establish, sustain, and/or resist power. Gunnar Olsson and John Pickles are two geographers who have separately critiqued cartographic reason by identifying the ways in which maps are constructs that often reflect ideological motivations, while [Page 622]Ken Hillis has argued for an explicit engagement of communication theories among geographers.

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