Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5
turns to electronic governance, or e-government. As with the market,
the internet has helped to usher in a broad restructuring of the state. From simple
on-line procurements of government documents and official information to the
interactive facilities of web 2.0, e-government offers numerous possibilities to
change the interactions between citizens and the state. As with e-commerce, and
internet use and growth more broadly, e-government varies geographically. The
chapter thus highlights regional differences in e-government in many domains
across the planet.
Chapter 6
concludes the volume with a survey of social media. With cell
phones, e-mail, and sites such as Facebook, more people are more connected to
one another today than at any time in human history. What does this process mean
for the nature of the self in the digital age? After charting the geographies of
mobile phones and Facebook, the chapter concludes that a new, deeply relational
self is gradually displacing the traditional Western model of the subject, i.e., the
autonomous Cartesian individual devoid of social roots and origins. The chapter
concludes with a plethora of examples about how social media been harnessed to
further progressive political movements.
Throughout the volume, emphasis is placed on regional and national variations
in internet access and usage, government censorship, commerce, and e-govern-
ment. There are no doubt large and important variations within countries as well,
although we know much less about them. The point of this regional emphasis is to
demonstrate that place still matters, that the internet hardly floats in some neth-
erworld independent of real world politics, culture, and economics, and that any
realistic understanding of cyberspace must take into consideration its geographic
variations. These vignettes are not intended to be comprehensive: rather, they
should be seen as indicators that all the world's enormous social diversity is
recapitulated in the digital realm, with widely varying incentives, opportunities,
constraints, and impacts of internet usage.
References
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Castells, M. (1997). The information age, volume II: The power of identity. Cambridge:
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Castells, M. (2001). The internet galaxy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crampton, J. (2003). The political mapping of cyberspace. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
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Friedman, E. (2005). The reality of virtual reality: The internet and gender equality advocacy in
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