Wired People in Wired Places: Stories about Machines and the Geography of Activity

This article examines the relationship between the technologies of communication and mobility and the geography of everyday life. Centered on the period from the Industrial Revolution to the present, stories about machines contribute biographies of several technologies leading to contemporary intersections among communications, transport, and geography. The advance of technology has recently been marked by the production of hypermobility where, in some places, the numeric majority access and make use of a nearly ubiquitous supply of communication and mobility infrastructures and devices. Data from the International Telecommunication Union, the U. S. Federal Highway Administration, and the Canadian Internet Project support observations regarding the rise of hypermobility in the United States and elsewhere. The geography of action and activity continues to evolve within a hypermobile present where information and communication technologies intercede between people and place, producing digitally augmented metageographies and the potential extinction of experience.