At the Speed of Light There is Only Illumination: A Reappraisal of Marshall McLuhan

Does the Space Make Differences? Some Geographical Remarks about Spatial Information between Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan

Does the Space Make Differences?1 Some Geographical Remarks about Spatial Information between Harold Innis2 and Marshall McLuhan MARIO NEVE Introduction ^INCE WHAT I WILL TRYTOPROBE and uncover is part of research i progress, many questions will probably remain unanswered. First, I will briefly outline, with the aid of Harold Innis's concept of "bias," some features of a possibledefinition of spatial information that meet the present crisis in the traditional concept of territory. Second, I will show how Marshall McLuhan gestures toward the cartographic origins of nation­ states—that is, the way in which map, as medium, really processed the world. Finally, I will suggest a possible and very general frame of reference for further research. My intention is to focus on a possible way to explain how exactly the notion of territory could, cope with the so­called know­ ledge economy,3 information economy, or digital economy.5 I say "ex­ actly" because, for this purpose, I think it essential to develop the concept of spatial information, which does not mean merely the communication through space or with spatial media, but the production of the space as information.6 Provisionally, we'll make reference to the definition of information given by Gregory Bateson—that is, "any difference that makes a differ­ ence"7 —and we'll start by asking whether space makes differences or not. If making information is to produce "news of difference," then spatial 6 154 information should be produced by something similar to a difference between two "entities," such that this difference is immanent in their mutual relation8 —difference whose news "can be represented as a differ­ ence inside some information­processingentity."9 Bateson asserts that "all description, explanation, or representation is necessarily in some sense a mapping of derivatives from the phenomena to be described onto some surface or matrix or system of coordinates. . . . Every receiving matrix, even a language or a tautological network of propositions, will have its formal characteristicswhich will in principle be distortive of the phenomena to be mapped onto it."10 In this sense, spatial information produced by the map, working asan "information­processing entity," is as a matter of fact an explanation of the world mapped onto it. So, an explanation doesn't work, as might be expected, as a simple record­ ing of the news of differences, but as a choice; a selection among alternative ways to represent them. Since the map "in principle" makes a distortion of the data to be recorded, this means that the map is a powerful image of the world, and mapping is a conceptual device, very old and very influential, although presented as a "simple data recording." I. Where Have Old Territories Gone? At the beginning of 1998, according to the press agencies, Tom Chris­ tian—a descendant of Fletcher Christian, who headed the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789 and settled in remote Pitcairn Island the following year— announced his intention to put Pitcairn Island on the Web as a site and then to license the domain "pn." Indeed, such a claim—which joins together on the Internet the right issuing from territory (jus soli) and that issuing from descent (jus sanguinis)—has an old­fashioned look. Indeed, the "age of discoveries," dating roughly from the end of the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, was an era in which geography was "essentiellement savoir la carte,"11 and a geographer could say "that is not geography which cannot be mapped."12 To survey a newly discovered place or region to be mapped meant to make an "immutable mobile"13 —that is, to William Ivins, an "exactly repeatable pictorial statement."14 In fact, the spatial features reproduced by the map (strictly speaking: produced by the map) were drawn from the discovered land, an example of spatial information 155 that allowed the empires involved in the conquering of the New World a "radical tide," a valid title giving the possessor international acknowledg­ ment before the ruling powers of the age.15 But now, on the Internet, what does such a claim mean? Recently, two British geographers made an attempt to investigate the features of "Internet real estate."16 They showed some paradoxes that stress, the old­fashioned character of Christians claim. Cyberspace is a space in which "land planning" means the management of the global IP address space (i.e., the addressing standard used to identify and locate computers on the network...