Cybergeography

Cybergeography is the study of the nature of the Internet through the spatial perspectives of geography and cartography; it is an emerging field of analysis that seeks to reveal the various ways that place and space matter in Internet development and usage. Cybergeography, then, is broadly conceived, focusing on the geographies of the Internet itself (the spatialities of online activity and information), its supporting infrastructures (wires, cables, satellites, etc.), and the spatial implications of Internet technologies with respect to cultural, social, economic, political. and environmental issues. Much cybergeography research has focused on mapping and producing spatializations (giving spatial form to information that has no spatial referents) of the Internet, drawing on and contributing to principles underpinning much of geographic information science.

Since the development of wide-area computer networking technologies in the late 1960s, the Internet has grown into a vast sociotechnical assemblage of many thousands of interconnected networks supporting numerous different types of communications media: e-mail, Web pages, instant messaging, ftp, telnet, virtual worlds, game spaces, and so on. Hundreds of millions of people go online every day to communicate, to be entertained, and to do business, and billions of transactions occur across the Internet and intranets every day. Despite rhetoric that the Internet is placeless and that advances in telecommunications are fostering the “death of distance,” it is clear that place and space still matter, because the Internet still requires concentrations of expensive hardware and infrastructure to work and companies still require skilled workers and other forms of infrastructure and business networks that are located in geographic space to function effectively.