Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
teaching is the University of Phoenix, based in Arizona but with students located
around the world; with more than 400,000 students, it is now the largest university in
the world. Some universities, such as Stanford, have begun offering free on-line
courses to hundreds of thousands of students at a time, and given birth to new
corporations such as Coursera.org. Distance learning has provoked fears that it
opens the door to the corporatization of academia and the domination of the profit
motive, while others have questioned whether the chat rooms that form an important
part of its delivery system are an effective substitute for the face-to-face teaching and
learning that classrooms offer. It remains unclear whether Web-based learning is an
effective complement or substitute for traditional forms of instruction. Others
suggest that distance-learning programs may be better suited to professional pro-
grams in business or engineering than in the liberal arts.
More morally ambiguous is the growing role of Internet-based gambling
systems, which include a variety of betting services, especially concerning sports
events, and even online slot machines in which gamblers may use their credit cards
(Wilson
2003
). (Some complain that online gambling doesn't adequately substitute
for the heady experience of a gaudy casino in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, New
Jersey). Because the geography of legal gambling is highly uneven, the existence
of such systems challenges the laws of communities in which gambling is illegal.
Offshore gambling centers have grown quickly, particularly in the Caribbean,
which started when Antigua licensed its first Internet casino in 1994. In 2011, an
estimated 1,000 online casinos, mostly in the Caribbean, attracted roughly 12
million users. Similarly, Zook (
2003
) called attention to the internet's role in the
''online adult industry.''
4.7 Regional Geographies of E-Commerce
As with internet use more broadly, and internet censorship, there is no ''one-size-
fits-all'' model of e-commerce. Rather, the magnitude and form it assumes is
highly dependent on the contextual specifics of individual regions. As Gefen and
Heart (
2009
) point out, e-commerce is intimately wrapped up with cultural norms
of trust, reputation, familial contacts, tacit knowledge, and other related dimen-
sions. E-commerce is also differentially enabled and constrained by national legal
systems, including intellectual property rights and the degree of security of online
transactions, all of which conspire to give it a very real regional geography.
4.7.1 North America
The internet is having significant effects on the Canadian economy (Janelle
2001
;
Michalak and Jones
2003
), where numerous firms use it to raise market shares and
reduce transactions costs. Online sales, which surpassed $15.1 billion in 2009
