Mapping Cybergeographies

Stephen Graham Newcastle University

The Myth of the “End of Geography”

•  60s-90s: Pervasive rhetoric of “death of distance”, “end of geography”, “end of cities”

•  Apparently limitless and infinite mobilities •  Bill Gates “Friction-free capitalism” •  Virilio “Urbanization of real time” •  Substitutionist and deterministic assumptions: “anything-anywhere-anytime dream”

•  Dematerialisation, withdrawal from physical world: body-city-geography

•  And yet a new age of cartography is emerging centred on revealing the lie to these myths:

•  1. Visualizations of Cyberspace •  2. Visualizing Cyberspace

Topologies and Flows •  3. Visualizing Cyberspace

Materialities •  4. Mapping Uneven Geographies •  5. A Geolocated World:

Animating Geographies Through GPS/Mobile/Satellites/Ubiquitous Computing

•  Highly charged politics of mapping cybergeographies

1. Visualizations of Cyberspace

•  Cartographic techniques which help make informational domains legible, navigable, memorable

•  Widespread use of geographical and urban metaphors

•  Increasing blurring of cyberspace/real space boundary

Classic ‘Virtual Reality’ Paradigm: Immersive, 3D: Marginalize the Body

Also Imaginary Geographies of Virtual Worlds

Alphaworld Virtual ‘City’

SimCity

Video Game Urban Simulations

Using Familiar Urban Cartography to Structure Online Content

Geographical Metaphors to Structure Complex Online Content

Amsterdam ‘Digital City’

Sometimes utilise

national maps

2. Visualizing Cyberspace Topologies and Flows

•  Capture the connectivities of ICT systems and how the topological connections and flows of data are constructed to benefit certain interests and/or geographical areas

•  Exposes extraordinarily stark and uneven geographies and hidden biases of connectivity

Online position: informational space

Topological Map of the Internet

Alt.discussion groups

Hierarchical mapping

The UK JANET Academic Backbone

Mapping 24hr Global Flows

Trace Routing

3. Visualizing Cyberspace Materialities

•  Material infrastructures supporting ‘cyberspace’ generally neglected or ignored (until they fail)

•  Physical and cultural invisibility •  And yet they have highly uneven and important

geographies at all spatial scales: global to the urban •  E.g. Manhattan has more optic fibre than Africa •  Such patterns do much to reveal political, economic and

cultural geographies of power

Evolution of ARPANET

Transnational Optic Fibre Networks

Triumvirate of Dominant Capitalist Heartland Regions: N Am, Eur, E Asia

New Fibre Corridors and E-Peripheries

International Phone Traffic

and Bypassed

Zones

Satellite ‘Footprints’

Highly Uneven Urban and Regional ‘Dot.Com Geographies’: UK ‘Spikes’

Matt Zook’s US ‘Dot.Com’ Map

Zook’s Bay Area

Down Town San Francisco

Dodge’s IP Address Density Surface in London

WiFi ‘Hot Spots’

Revealing Fibre for Local Economic Promotion e.g. San Diego

Digitised Urban Simulacra

Virtual Los Angeles

Webcams: Cyberspace as Prosthetic Eyes

4. Mapping Uneven Geographies

•  Mapping cybergeographies can act as proxies to reveal and visualise uneven development, divisions of labour, and geographies of social polarisation at all geographical scales: From technogeopolitics to urban social geographies

•  An Examples: Technogeopolitics-- Global N-S relations

Technogeopolitics: Contrasts Global Population Density and Internet Router Density

Main Concentrations of Domain Names

Postcolonial Techno Geopolitics of Connectivity

Cartograms to Demonstrate Who Dominates Web Growth: 2007

2015 (projected)

5. Geolocated Worlds: Animating

Geographies Through GPS/

Mobile/ Ubiquitous Computing

•  Eg Amsterdam Realtime project 2002

•  Seehttp://www.interactivearchitecture.org/amsterdam-realtime-waag-society.html

Google Earth/Google Maps: Covergence of Geolocation/ Remote Sensing/ Virtual reality/ Photography/Navigation

Produces Active Mash-Ups as “New Spatial Media”

These Co-exist With Growing Sophistication and Commercialisation of Parallel, Online Worlds

Conclusions •  New age of cartography revealing the lie of cyberutopian

or dystopian rhetoric of the death of geography or distance through real-time

•  Shift from geographical metaphors to help make cyberspace navigable, to sophisticated mapping of the geographical bases and materialities that sustain ‘cyberspace’

•  Blurring real/virtual boundaries •  As with all cartography, these representations biased and

politicised, but very revealing •  Shit towards dynamic, animated, cartographies generated

by everyday mobilities