Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
cross-ownership that typically de
ect even the most dogged of auditors.
Thus, despite the putatively aspatial nature of electronic money and the
extreme fungibility of electronic
fl
fi
financial capital, place still matters in the
geography of of
ff
shore banking in the forms of locally embedded local
policies.
What do back o
shore banks have in common?
Information and services in these activities is also embodied in actor-networks,
but in a very di
ces, call centers, and o
ff
erent degree than that found
in global cities. Precisely because such functions rely on standardized, highly
fungible sorts of information, or Polanyi's (1967) explicit knowledge, they
can be disembedded from local cultures. Such low-wage, unskilled tasks can
be switched easily from one locale to another, leaving these places vulnerable
to the demands of
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erent manner and to a very di
ff
firms. The labor force of such operations utilizes docile
women who are never engaged in contacts with clients or suppliers. Thus, stan-
dardized services tend to be vertically integrated. As world-systems advocates
have long maintained (Wallerstein 1979; Chase-Dunn 1989; Shannon 1996),
one of the key di
fi
erences between the world's core and its periphery is the
presence of free versus unfree labor, the former characterized by relatively
high wages and better working conditions. In this respect, back o
ff
ces and
call centers represent the plantations of the global service economy.
The Internet, or, the network of networks that annihilated space
Among the various networks that comprise the nation's and world's tele-
communications infrastructure, the largest, most famous, and most in
uential
is undoubtedly the Internet, an unregulated electronic network connecting an
estimated one billion people in more than 150 countries in 2005 (Warf 2006).
The Internet allows users to transcend distance almost instantaneously,
generating total time-space compression. It is, perhaps, the quintessential sym-
bol of postmodern capitalism: electronic, globalized, and rapidly evolving.
From its military origins in the U.S. in the 1960s, the Internet emerged upon
a global scale through the integration of existing telephone,
fl
fiber optic, and
satellite systems (Rosenzweig 1998). The ability to send and receive
fi
fi
files from
di
erent networks was made possible by the technological innovation of
packet switching and Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) technology,
in which individual messages may be decomposed, the constituent parts trans-
mitted by various channels, and then reassembled, virtually instantaneously,
at the destination. Spurred by declining prices of services and equipment, the
Internet grew worldwide at stupendous rates, the number of users doubling
roughly every year, making it the most rapidly di
ff
using technology in history
(Figure 5.4). The growth of the Internet was fueled in part by graphical
interfaces such as the World Wide Web, which permits the integration of
multimedia with hypertext links in a single platform, generating a global, inter-
active web of webs. Popular access systems such as America On-Line allow any
individual with a microcomputer and modem to “plug in” to cyberspace.
ff
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