The Geography of Cyberspace

Abstract

Editorial The geography of cyberspace In previous editorials, I have speculated on the diverse impacts of information technology and telecommunications on the form and function of cities, stressing the importance of rapid changes in these communications media upon spatial form and social process, but also emphasizing the difficulties in charting and understanding the new geography which is emerging. The basic assumption so far is one that underlies the changes automation has wrought upon industrial society: capital replaces labor, machines replace men, with the consequent notion that automation implies the substitution of one factor of production for another. This idea has, unwittingly perhaps, been transferred wholesale to our treatment of the way computers and telecommunications are impacting upon physical space. The classic example is telecommuting, in which it has been variously assumed that 'working from home' replaces traditional employment at the workplace. In fact, this idea of one product or process substituting for another is basic to neoclassical economics, but it increasingly appears to be wrongheaded. It is based on the notion that life is a zero-sum game in which new things must take away the old, in which there are ultimate limits on our capacity to communicate and interact, that one technology replaces another. Despite widespread agreement that society is becoming more complex, there is still the notion that increasing complexity is due more to the increase in opportunities provided by greater resources and wealth than to any innate increase in the capacity of individuals to interact. Of course, this Malthusian way of thinking has always admitted a degree of uncertainty over the idea of fixed resources but it is only quite recently that striking examples of its limitations in terms of the evolution of urban society have become apparent. In our own field, what studies there have been of telecommuting clearly reveal that one form of work does not substitute for another, and the emerging studies on learning via computers show that these new media enhance rather than substitute for what already exists. Nowhere is this clearer than in the development of new forms of working through the synthesis of computers and communications. Although new physical infrastructure in terms of networks and computers is something that is being added to the structure of cities and regions, the real impact is in terms of new types of 'spaces' which are being created, which go well beyond the wires and boxes making up the media. A decade ago, the notion that telecommunications and computers would create a new kind of space, invisible to our direct visual senses, a space which might be more important than physical space itself, and which could have enormous impacts on the form of cities, seemed fanciful. But the skeleton of this space is already there, and it is one of the fastest growing phenomena of all time. Simply in terms of the 'Internet', the network of networks which primarily connects the academic community worldwide, the growth is staggering. The number of computers attached to the net was about 1.6 million in April 1993, and this is growing at a rate of 10% each month. The number of users is estimated at near 20 million, and this is but one network, amongst thousands. The online or virtual communities (Rheingold, 1993) which are less visible to academia form a vast, highly structured, indeed highly institutionalized web with multiple and diverse linkages to the Internet and to each other. At the local level,