Ronald F. Abler
Humankind has employed numerous technologies to redefine places (and regions) throughout human existence. Television, computers, the Internet, and the World Wide Web are recent, but increasingly dominant variations on a persistent historical theme. Existing and prospective media networks appear to permit fundamental transformations of traditional economic, legal, political, social, and cultural relationships. The power and promise of evolving information technologies have led some analysts to question the fundamental assumptions and principles underlying geography and related specialties, including the viability and validity of place as a basic locus of human experience, and an intellectual construct. Current speculation on the nature of place in relation to information technology can be divided into four realms of increasing abstraction: 1) the places and spaces of economic geography; 2) legal and political conceptions and definitions of place; 3) social and cultural dimensions of place; and 4) perceptions of places and spaces. A distinction between geography and space cuts across all four aspects of the question.
Despite widespread belief to the contrary, information technologies cannot and will not repeal the fundamental laws of economic geography. In communications technologies as in other kinds of economic relationships among the places of the earth, frictions of distance remain and will persist. Geography is ineluctable.
Precise legal definitions of places, especially political units, have been muddled by increasing attempts by law enforcement agencies in some places to assert jurisdiction over acts committed well beyond the traditional reach of local law enforcement. As increasingly valuable resources, information and information flows will become sources of domestic and international conflict.
Social and cultural relationships have always been intimately linked to communications media and to places. The supple nature of emerging media and their often high costs of participation open new possibilities for defining both place and society in ways that will highlight the tensions between integration and segregation of diverse social and cultural groups.
Because they are products of fertile human imagination, the perceptions of place and places enabled by evolving information technologies offer especially exciting (and occasionally alarming) possibilities. Information technologies may provide substitutes for direct experience of the places of the earth, they may enhance that experience, or they may do both.
Consideration of these four tensions leads to a distinction between cybergeography and cyberspace. The difference between the two highlights the role of human choice in directing the variety of ways information technologies will be employed to define places--actually and virtually--in the future.