Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 5.4
Growth of Internet hosts worldwide, 1981-2006.
The social and economic impacts of cyberspace include a varieties of cor-
porate activities often lumped together under the term e-commerce, which
includes both business-to-business transactions as well as those linking
rms
to their customers (Brunn and Leinbach 2001; Freund and Weinhold 2002).
For many corporations, information technology lowered transaction costs,
accelerating information
fi
firms. One important ver-
sion of ecommerce concerns electronic data interchange (EDI) systems,
which are generally used in business-to-business contacts. Common uses of
EDI include up-to-date advertising, online product catalogues, the sharing of
sales and inventory data, submissions of purchase orders, contracts, invoices,
payments, delivery schedules, product updates, and labor recruitment. Within
a decade of its birth, the Internet and Web threatened every type of trad-
itional information and media provider, from bookstores to television com-
panies, from newspapers to
fl
flows within and among
fi
film producers. Electronic publishing has been
extended to e-books and e-magazines, which unlike printed text can be com-
plemented with sound and graphics. Other services o
fi
ff
er Internet searches
of databases and classi
ed advertisements. E-commerce transformed the
Internet from a communications to a commercial system, widening com-
modity chains and accelerating the pace of customer orders, procurement,
production, and product delivery.
For consumers, shopping by the Internet requires only electronic access
and a credit card, and allows e
fi
ortless comparison shopping. On-line retail
shopping, or “e-tailing,” has grown exponentially, particularly for large
ff
rms
(e.g., WalMart) and given birth to entirely virtual stores such as Amazon.com.
The higher levels of competition that the Internet facilitated have reduced
costs signi
fi
cantly. Shoppers using the Internet tend to be above-average in
income and relatively well educated. A particularly successful application has
been in the travel reservation and ticketing business, where Web-based pur-
chases of hotel rooms and airline seats have caused a steady decline in the
number of travel agents. However, Internet advertising has proven to be dif-
fi
fi
ficult, in part because the Internet reaches numerous specialized markets
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