ABSTRACT
In the recent turn toward “materialist approaches” to media and mobility there has been an effort to investigate the significance of communication not simply as image, message, or content to be relayed from one point to another, but rather as an embodied spatial practice that produces space/time and is itself constitutive of social orders (Packer and Wiley 2012). Such an approach builds on the early work of James Carey on the materiality of communication, especially in its relation to transportation networks such as the train and the telegraph (Packer and Robertson 2007), while also incorporating more recent mobilities theory which also pays attention to the material infrastructures and “moorings” of mobility and communication systems, and their spatio-temporal effects (Sheller and Urry 2006; Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006). News media are especially dependent on various infrastructural moorings, including communications and transportation networks of various kinds, that enable news to flow. This article draws on the interdisciplinary field of mobilities
research to think about the mobile production, dissemination, and consumption of news, and in particular how new interrelations between the spaces and times for news production and consumption produce new spatial temporalities for the “flow” of news (a term discussed in more detail below).
