Few key elements in the communications field have received such a low critical review as the notion of space. This point is surprising. There are several contributions that invite to a reconceptualization of what we understand by this concept, and that come from contributions made by Edward Hall and his proxemic theory; or the analytical developments of Foucalt, Certeau and Bourdieu’s work. Despite all this genealogy, the space is still understood, almost, related to common sense, as a mere scenery where things happen. The important thing, from the communications perspective, is to analyze what type of representations are built in the interaction between people, as if the environment were the same in every culture.

A good example of how notions of space, geography and political economics can be thought is the classic book of David Harvey, The condition of posmodernity. For the author, posmodernity implies a new form of conceptualizing the space-time experience, that, even when it doesn’t imply a radical rupture with modernism, it has new elements to be analyzed.

Direct communicatin has been a field that, traditionally, communication careers in Argentina have neglected, focusing in hyperobserving the media. Despite, quotidian life was a relevant object of study from multiple authors, some as different as Gramsci, de Certeau, Goffman or Garfinkel.

In tourism, the space is highly regulated to guarantee certain behaviors and discourage others. What it’s looking for is that visitors spend as much money as possible, stay for a while and then leave. And any legislation clearly establishes maximum stay periods in their countries, after which a person loses his tourist status.

There are many tight links between the forms of contruction of space and time, worth to be developed in further entries.

Every time people talk more about the advantages of wireless connections through WiFi, and the uses to make employees and executives of a company be connected the whole time with their office work. But as you can see in this note of Finanzas.com, the use of wireless nets help firms look for a raise in their workers productivity, particularly the highest paid ones. And when broad band connections start operating in airplanes, as in Lufthansa soon, things will get even more interesting.

In a previous entry in my blog in spanish, I commented on a note of the travel supplement by argentinean newspaper Clarin about Potrero Funes, a locality of San Luis. The text is a praise to the location and one wonders where is the famous impartial position of the media. Now, I was browsing the Tourism supplement of the newspaper La Nacion, where a series of notes of -again, what are the chances?- San Luis were published.

The note is already titled as a gazette: “San Luis: defying the limits of the unknown” (in spanish only). Then, the note is a long series of praises, where there’s not even a trace of negativity. Journalism, it doesn’t look like it: there are no contrasting data, no sources cited, no features that distinguish this article from a press gazette.

In my other blog in spanish, I usually complain about how album reviews made by rock magazines never state a single bad launching. The same thing happens to me with tourism supplements: I never find an impartial evaluation of the destinations: there are no negative details or these are placed in the last paragraph. I understand that usually journalist that visit these locations are invited by the province’s tourism offices, or even by travel agencies and are conditioned many times by commercial agreements that the media where they work at have made. But it doesn’t sound very honest to seel this as “journalism”, it’s more a marketing or advertising space. I wonder if anyone might take seriously the recommendations of these newspaper’s travel supplements.

I also wonder if it wouldn’t be ethical to reveal to the readers who financed the journalist’s trip. I think it would be importat, to know from which perspective to read this kind of notes.

In the same marketing style, you can find notes here and here. In the case of the last cited note, that belongs to the newspaper Clarin, the first phrase seems directly dictated by a press agency: “the geography of Chaco is a fountain of life that doesn’t rest”. A remarkable revelation, considering that Chaco is one of the poorest provinces in Argentina, where between 1990 and 2001 24 out of every thousand newborn babies died, outnumbered only by Formosa and Tucuman provinces. This last information is provided by the INDEC, the Institute of Statistics and Census in Argentina. More information can be found here, in Excel format.