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Abstract
This article offers a conjunctural analysis of the various factors that must be taken into account to explain the development of the COVID-19 pandemic. It offers an interdisciplinary perspective on questions of how virtual and material geographies are enmeshed, paying particular attention to the continuing importance of transport infrastructures. The key concerns are with the politics of differential power over—and access to—mobility, in both its actual and virtual modalities. The COVID-19 crisis is argued to have functioned both as a mode of amplification of many preexisting forms of inequality and as a powerful solvent of the unexamined presumptions of the dominant discourse of globalization.

What are the premises of the major questions in media theory? Arguing for better questions this contribution notes the persistence of eurocentricism, ­mediacentricism and technological determinism and the dominance of the ­experience of what Jared Diamond calls the WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democracies) nations in framing the terms of debate and study.Anthropology in works such as Larkin (2008) may help defamiliarise the ­presumptions of western media theory and more clearly address the question of 'Where is the global "Greenwich Mean Time" of Media Theory?' Arguing for the need to place the technological present in historical perspective (cf Edgerton, 2008) this contribution makes the case for the primacy of historical and spatial contexts over the immediate moment of technological invention – on which so much attention is customarily focussed. To focus on media technologies and 'inventions' without considerations of their context runs the risks of embracing such dangerous simplifications as the idea that their socio-cultural effects can be deduced from their presumed technological 'essences' – whereas any given technology may very well come to have quite different significance in varying cultural contexts.

In a context where the study of communications tends to focus only on the mobility of information, to the neglect of that of people and commodities, this article explores the potential for a closer integration between the fields of communications and transport studies. Against the presumption that the emergence of virtuality means that material geographies are no longer of consequence, the role of mediated 'technologies of distance' is considered here in the broader contexts of the construction (and regulation) of a variety of physical forms of mobility and the changing modes of articulation of the virtual and material worlds.