Geography and the ICT. New Technologies & Geographical Research

New technologies are introducing important changes in all scientific objects, especially in the field of Geography. Ubiquity of media, above all new media, provides top down and bottom up generated contents. These contents can be produced everywhere and at any time. An increasing use of new media brings about an overproduction of texts and images that, furthermore, puts a greater emphasis on the Territory. Large volumes of accessible forms of narration, are increasingly available. Known as web generated content, despite being almost impossible to verify often have an extremely strong influence both in and over territorialisation processes. This change is highly significant and calls into question social relationships and the subjectivities. Online experience tends to be totalizing, it meets needs in terms of: security, socialization, communication, information and self-esteem, and are now used to generate a new territorial understanding and representation In this contemporary communicative context, territory becomes a narrated subject and assumes new configurations that readjust and balance its significance with new semiological suggestions. Digital communication is a tool with a strong impact both in storytelling and territorial representation, a tool that poses new theoretical and practical questions. In recent years research has focused on this tool as a media to represent and recount territorial complexity and cultural heritage. According to post-representational theory cartography must be understood as a dependent expression, strongly associated with the context that produces and exploits it. This perspective attempts to reach a compromise between those who consider maps as a technical instrument, related to an applied knowledge and those who understand maps as a form of power/knowledge, subjected to an ideological structure. This contest reveals the necessity to investigate the role that new technologies play in geographical research and how deeply they can modify geographical perception. Our question is, to what extent are these new technologies of representation and narration influencing the creation of a sense of territory