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What this represents is not just the loss of temporal continuity, of cause and effect, of
development and duration, that mutually anchor processes of production, communication
technologies, symbolic forms and contexts of reception. This is not the simple ‘triumph’ of
space over time. Instead, the atomization, discontinuity and transferability so central to the
informational model are also connected to the depletion of spatial (particularly geographical)
moorings, producing a new kind of compressed and relational space-time which stresses the
importance of propulsion from point to point. A move, in short, from place to flow.
Place-Flow: Manuel Castells is among the very few commentators on the information
age to explicitly, albeit briefly, acknowledge the influence of Innis (1996: 460). Among his
key claims in The Rise of the Network Society (1996) is that the dominant form of
contemporary spatial organization, as it crystallizes social structure and cultural experience,
can be characterized as ‘the space of flows’. Opposed to the space of places, the physical
organization of social communities around geographical places with specific narrative
histories and identities, the space of flows describes a mobile, purely relational space of
interconnections. A particular location – such as a city or a website – acquires its value and its
identity from its function in a network, in relation to all other nodes through which traffic
(money, people, information) passes. Without historical narrative or geographical singularity,
the space of flows is also the space of placeless instantaneousness, in which transfers occur in
a ‘timeless time’ of simultaneity without duration or boundedness – a condition that Innis
would have linked to the ‘present-mindedness’ with which he charged modern societies.
It is worth briefly enumerating some of the traces of the space of flows. With respect to
the representational modes of media, Raymond Williams (1990) famously described the chief
characteristic of television as sequence or flow, linking it to mobile privatization and
suburbanization. However, public broadcast television, in the age of what we quaintly refer to
as spectrum scarcity, was also very much modeled as a kind of place – the place of Benedict
Convention