Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
cyberspace. Despite the falling prices for hardware and software, basic entry-
level machines are often una
ordable for low-income households. Even
within the most digitized of cities there remain large pockets of of
ff
-line”
poverty (Thrift 1995). Those who need the Internet the least, already living in
information-rich environments with access through many non-Internet
channels (e.g., newspapers and cable TV), may have the most access to it,
while those who may bene
ff
t the most (e.g., through electronic job banks) may
have the smallest chance to log on. In short, the social categories of wealth
and power and geographical categories of core and periphery are reinscribed
in cyberspace. Rather than annihilate social inequalities, information systems
such as the Internet therefore may reinforce existing disparities in wealth,
connecting elites in di
fi
erent nations who may be increasingly disconnected
from the local environments of their own cities and countries. This phe-
nomenon must be viewed in light of the growing inequalities throughout
industrialized nations generated by labor market polarization (i.e., deindus-
trialization and growth of low-income, contingent service jobs).
These intra-national discrepancies in access are replicated at the inter-
national level, where, inequalities in access to the Internet internationally,
measured in terms of hosts per 100,000 people, re
ff
ect the long-standing bifur-
cation between the First and Third Worlds (Figure 5.5). The best-connected
nations are in Scandinavia, Canada, Australia, and Singapore, where more
than 70 percent of the population is online. In the U.S., the Internet penetra-
tion rate was 55 percent in 2005 (with substantial internal variations); however,
due to the enormous size of the American economy, 80 percent of all inter-
national Internet tra
fl
c is either to or from the U.S. Outside of North America
and Europe, the vast bulk of the world's people, particularly the Third World,
have little to no access to the Internet. Low incomes, inadequate infra-
structures, and unhelpful or oppressive governments play major roles in this
context. Access to the Internet across the world is also deeply conditioned by
the density, reliability, and a
ordability of national telephone systems. Most
Internet communications occurs along lines leased from telephone companies,
many of which are state-regulated (in contrast to the largely unregulated state
of the Internet itself). Prices for access vary by length of the phone call, dis-
tance, and the degree of monopoly: in nations with telecommunications mon-
opolies, prices are higher than in those with deregulated systems. These
economic discrepancies are mirrored in the increasingly uneven politics of the
postmodern digital world; Luke and Ó Tuathail (2000:377), for example, in
analyzing the political chaos that erupted in the aftermath of the cold war,
assert that “Politics is eclipsed by technology as citizens separate out into
either caches of netizens networking in the fast lanes of the global economy or
the trashbins of lumpen techno-proletarians stuck at the dead ends of net-
works.” The Internet is thus both symbolic and constitutive of postmodern
capitalism, and of the enormous changes in time and space that it has gener-
ated. Simplistic descriptions such as the death of distance or the annihilation
of space fail to do justice to the complexities involved in this process.
ff
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