Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1
Introduction
In December, 2011, more than 2.25 billion people used the internet, making it a
tool of communications, entertainment, and other applications accessed by roughly
32 % of the world's population (
www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
)
. For most
users these uses extend well beyond email, the most common internet use, to
include: bill payments and electronic banking; job and housing searches; stock
trading; ''e-tail'' shopping; searching for health information and news; online
classes; digital gambling; online videogames; Voice Over Internet Protocol tele-
phony; hotel and airline reservations; chat rooms; electronic tax payments;
downloading television programs, movies, digital music, and pornography; and
popular sites and services such as YouTube, Facebook, and Google. In all these
ways, and more, cyberspace offers profound real and potential effects on social
relations, everyday life, culture, politics, and other social activities. Indeed, for
rapidly rising numbers of people around the world, the ''real'' and the virtual have
become thoroughly interpenetrated. In this light, access to cyberspace is no longer
a luxury, but a necessity. As its applications have multiplied, the internet is having
enormous impacts across the globe, including interpersonal interactions and
everyday life, identity formation, retail trade and commerce, governance, and is
affecting the structure and form of cities, in the process generating round upon
round of non-Euclidean geometries in the context of a massive global wave of
time-space compression.
By now, digital reality and everyday life for hundreds of millions of people
have become so thoroughly fused that it is difficult, if not impossible, to disen-
tangle them. In this context, simple dichotomies such as ''off-line'' and ''on-line''
fail to do justice to the diverse ways in which the ''real'' and virtual worlds for
hundreds of millions are interpenetrated. Yet for many others—the familiar litany
of the poor, the undereducated, ethnic minorities, and the socially marginalized—
the internet remains a distant, ambiguous world. Denied regular access to cyber-
space by the inability to purchase a personal computer, the technical skills
necessary to log on, or public policies that assume their needs will be magically
addressed by the market, the information have-nots living in the economically
