Imaging global communications: An ecocritique

Through an overview of historical medals, logos, poems, paintings and engravings, imagery that picks at the gap between the persistence of the local and the deracination of the global enterprise, the article focuses on the visual imaginaries employed to mythologize and to make sense of the reach and power of global media, noting in particular the reduction of land and sea to blank canvases on which communication media superimpose their networks. The article serves as a genealogy of Internet cartography and infographics, attending to the problematic relations between text, numbers, diagrams and pictures and their displacement of environments and localities.