Signaling Hinterlands and the Spatial Networks of Digital Capitalism

This article develops the concept of signaling hinterlands to explain how digital social networks extend and shift the interconnections between a metropolis and its hinterlands. The relationship between metropolis and hinterlands—the multiple, overlapping, networked geographies on which cities rely—is a long-standing area of geographical inquiry. This dynamic reflects networks of densely and more sparsely populated places connected by asymmetric relations, thus far primarily envisioned as physical goods-related production activities. How do these relationships change in a geographical political economy centered around digital technologies? We argue that digital technologies expand the productive capacity of the hinterlands, reshaping the dynamics between places within and beyond the metropolis. With digital social networks and digital platforms, places can gain value through their potential to signal and amass social, cultural, and economic capital. Signaling hinterlands reflect the simultaneously cultural, symbolic, technological, political, and economic relations involved in networking places under digital capitalism. We leverage Google Maps visitor posts to document the interconnections between the San Francisco Bay Area metropolis and Calla Lily Valley, a rural locale that we argue has become a digitally induced hinterland. Mapping postings from users who recorded visits to Calla Lily Valley, we examine how digital traces re-create and alter the asymmetric relations between rural and urban, metropolis and hinterlands in the digital economy.