On living in a techno-globalised world: Questions of history and geography

The article surveys perspectives on technological change and globalisation which might be seen as ‘media-centric’ in respect of their assumptions about the extent to which media technologies themselves are necessarily the driving force of cultural and political change. It argues for the need to situate contemporary forms of technological ‘newness’ in historical perspective, if we are to avoid a narrowly foreshortened form of ‘presentism’. It also offers an alternative, ‘contextualist’ view of how we might analyse the ways in which particular technologies are mobilised in different cultural contexts and considers how, rather than focussing on ‘universalised’ models of technologically driven change, we might develop a comparative forms of analysis informed by anthropological and comparative perspectives on technology use.