John Pickles, "Representations in an Electronic Age: Geography, GIS, and Democracy," Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995): 1-30.

SYNOPSIS:

Pickles traces some of the arguments within the discipline of geography over the use and practice of GIS. Some geographers have embraced the technology while others have seen it as an "instrumental reassertion in a discipline that has fought hard to rid itself of notions of space as the dead and the inert." Pickles argues that GIS needs a "critical theory" that understands the technology within the broader set of economic and cultural relationships defined by power, business, markets, and academic pressures.

EXCERPT:

"Since electronic information technologies provide more information and faster access across broader spans of space, they are presumed to be technologies that are liberating. Such a mythos of public benefit accruing from the ability to gain access to new and broader forms of data, and to represent this data spatially in a wide array of images, has been instrumental in the adoption of the new telematics within universities, planning agencies, environmental bodies, and the corporate and business world." (20)