"New lands: the network and the geographic imaginary" Terry Harpold Department of English University of Florida Copyright (c)2000 Terry Harpold. All rights reserved. Abstract This paper sketches a conceptual genealogy of a visual trope repeated in myriad forms throughout contemporary informational culture: the imbricated "mapping" of informational networks and lived human spaces, usually in the form of a systematic constellation of signal paths laid over a cartographic base - the so-called Internet or network "map." I have observed elsewhere that these images are widely employed in popular and even academic venues as props for unacknowledged and pernicious metageographical interpretations of the wired and unwired realms ("Dark Continents"). In this presentation, I will propose that these images synthesize elements of specific historical precursors in the cartographic and geometrical-perspectival representation of space - and that this synthesis betrays a conceptual and political-economic strategy of rationalization and reduction: a fitting of heterogenous, inconsistent fields of human symbolic exchange to the confines of a naively instrumentalist lexicon of space. Works Cited Harpold, Terry. "Dark Continents: Critique of Internet Metageographies." Postmodern Culture 9.2 (January, 1999).