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TopConceptualizing E-Government: Geography And Cyberspace
A cottage industry of geographers has artfully charted the origins and growth of cyberspace, its uneven social and spatial diffusion, and its multiple impacts, ranging from cybercommunities to digital divides to electronic commerce (Kellerman, 2016; Zook, 2005; Warf, 2012). Zook and Graham (2007) note the internet’s “core and periphery” structure, as exemplified by the dominant role played by search engines such as Google, and voice concerns over the privatization of the digital commons. This literature offers a valuable means for spatializing the internet, demonstrating its rootedness in social relations and changing geographic relations of proximity, and serves as a necessary antidote to many prevailing utopian and technocratic interpretations.
The geographical literature on cyberspace has addressed a variety of issues, including the internet and retail trade, or e-tailing (Weltevreden & Atzema, 2006; Fekete, 2015), the impact of race (Crutcher & Zook, 2009), neogeography (Graham, 2009), Digital Earth (Goodchild, 2013), internet gambling (Wilson, 2003), cyberwar (Warf & Fekete, 2015), surveillance and biometrics (Graham & Wood, 2003; Popescu, 2017), and internet censorship (Warf, 2010). This body of work has gone a long way toward demolishing popular myths such as the notion that cyberspace is placeless or that it somehow is immune to the social constraints that pervade everyday life. Rather, it has demonstrated how powerfully the internet is wrapped up in prevailing configurations of power and culture, revealing its deeply political character: social inequalities are inevitably reinscribed in cyberspace.