Extract

Media are technologies enabling the transfer of ideas, information and meaning though space and time. The digital revolution of the past decades led to the transformation of the mass media such as the press and television and made possible of so-called social media permitting a more individualized circulation of contents. This new technological environment has liberated communication flows at the global scale. However, as proved by the analysis of online mass media content, the new digital environment has not led to a radical transformation of ideas, or information and meaning associated to space.

In fact, media and borders are still strongly interrelated. Producers and users of media contents are developing routines in a material context made of bounded networks, limited flows, given scales and contained territories involving social, economic, political and cultural parameters. They are influenced by a series of pre-existing border effects that they help to reproduce or overcome through the definition and practice of circulated information.

This media-border connection can be analyzed from different perspectives. First of all, one should never forget that the media implies the existence of business models and consequently the presence of clients to be enticed. The link between media and spatial borders can consequently be studied from an economic geography angle. As argued by Robert Picard, spatialized information circulated by news producers is intimately related to the limited space of consumption where the audience is located. This containment does not mean that mass media producers have no...