Geographies of connectivity in East Africa: trains, telecommunications, and technological teleologies

The early twenty-first century has witnessed much excitement about the hugely transformative effects of rapidly changing communication and transportation technologies. Politicians, journalists, and academics have all argued that technological advancements are enabling new and unprecedented types of economic, social, and political connectivities and relationships. The ‘death of distance’ (Cairncross, 1997), the ‘space of flows’ (Castells, 1996), the ‘global village’ (McLuhan, 1962), ‘time-space compression’ (Harvey, 1990), the ‘network society’ (Castells, 2004), and myriad other ways of imagining space/time reconfigurations have all been used to make sense of changing connectivities and positionalities.