metaphor is useful for talking about usability,
training, and learning, but it offers few insights
into how the tool is embedded in the larger con-
text. As they put it: ‘People who see technology
as a tool see themselves controlling it. People
who see technology as a system see themselves
caught up inside it’ (1999: 27). What is more,
tools have politics. Construing the cultural
implications of technology to be those of the
tool maintains or reinforces the hegemony of
those who develop and control the ‘tools’.
Embedded as infrastructure, geographic techno-
logies are bound up in the production of geo-
graphic knowledge, and this, in turn, impacts
culture more broadly.
Poststructuralist thought, informing recent
cultural geography’s probing of the destabiliza-
tion and complication of technology, provides a
multidimensional theoretical framework for
understanding the manifold linkages between
capitalist production, technology, culture, and
knowledge. As technological artefacts become
more pervasive they are changing the ways we
understand and represent the world. The
capitalist emphasis on technology to enhance the
extraction of surplus value is not a means unto
itself, but a political and social relationship that
is fundamental to changing terms about human-
ity. Technology is a political way of producing
knowledge that embeds values in artefacts
(Callon, 1991). As technological objects become
locationally aware through the global positioning
system and artificial intelligence techniques, our
ontological understanding of geography will
alter to include extra-experiential dimensions of
non-human geography. The consequences of this
opening can be more profound insights into the
dynamic relationships that constitute place and
our embeddedness in various scales of relation-
ships and flows that go beyond what is
physically connected (Massey, 1993).
Many cultural geographers have extended our
insights into the political dimensions that are
opened up by technologically influenced
ontologies. Oliver Froehling’s (1999) work on
the use of the internet by the Zapatista movement
offers a lucid example of the processes of de- and
reterritorialization that can occur by means of
what may be loosely called cyberspace. The pol-
itics of using technology have been frequently
studied and, as much of the work examined in
this chapter points out, more stimulating work
exploring the emergence of geography through
cultural practices can be expected. What we
should not overlook is the political tension
within geography over the use of technologies.
What we do with technology is always political.
It also always has real consequences, individually,disciplinarily, socially, and economically. These
domains highlight the complexity of the political
relationships and point to the inseparable rela-
tionship between geographic knowledge and
technology. Technology is integral to our
geographic understanding, our disciplinary iden-
tity, and our ontologies. The question asked at
the beginning of this chapter about the
connection between geographic knowledge and
technology is also a question about the politics of
geography’s changing ontologies and episte-
mologies. Regardless of how we answer this
question, the imbrication is ubiquitous and points
to the inevitability of the answer that they are
inseparable: technology always changes what we
know and how we know.NOTEI would like to thank John Paul Jones III, Kay Anderson,
Mona Domosh, Steve Pile, and Nigel Thrift for their help-
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