Barney Warf

Segueways into Cyberspace: Multiple Geographies of the Digital Divide

Despite stereotypes that cyberspace spells the ‘end of geography’ and promises universal, democratic entree to the electronic highways of the world economy, access to the Internet is highly unevenly distributed both socially and spatially. In this paper I examine the geopolitics of Internet access and its implications. I open by situating electronic communications within contemporary social theory, emphasizing cyberspace as a contested terrain of competing discourses. Second, international discrepancies in access are illustrated, dramatizing the ways in which the Internet enhances the advantages enjoyed by a global elite consisting largely of white, male professionals. Third, I turn to discrepancies in Internet access within the United States, including class, racial, gender, and spatial disparities. I seek to demonstrate that geography still matters; the Internet creates and reflects a distinct spatial structure interlaced with, and often reinforcing, existing relations of wealth and power.

From GIS to neogeography: ontological implications and theories of truth

Neogeography has emerged as a descriptive and analytical tool for large numbers of people outside of academia, a process catalyzed by digital mapping technologies and the social networking practices of Web 2.0. This article examines the ontological and epistemological implications of this transition. It argues that neogeography has democratized GIS practices, facilitated the adoption of relational views of space and place, and broadened the ontological scope of GIS. Neogeography also poses epistemological challenges to the dominant theory of truth, in particular advancing a shift away from the correspondence model of truth toward consensus and performative interpretations. While recognizing the multiple unintended consequences of neogeographical practices, neogeography is held to be as a useful means for charting geographic space in light of intense postmodern time–space compression.

Worlds of Affect: Virtual Geographies of Video Games

Video games are virtual worlds, each with its own, distinctive spatiality. This paper suggests that there are two interrelated conceptual dimensions to the study of video games. First, there are the representational issues concerning the worlds depicted in video games, such as those portraying hypersexualized women or Orientalist depictions of Arab enemies. We suggest, however, that these cultural, sexual, and political representations are not the only forces doing work on the player within the virtual world of a video game. This paper complements a purely representational approach by considering ‘affect’ as a precognitive force which disrupts and delights the player with reactions ranging from fear to joy. We argue that, as the spatiality of video games has evolved from simple two-dimensional to complex three-dimensional worlds; the importance of an affective experience to the player has become paramount. Exploiting and manipulating the players sensory experience is now the central strategy for many game designers. The paper is divided in two interrelated sections: the first tackles representational issues from culture to violence, while the second section contributes to our understanding of video games as ‘worlds of affect’.

Global E-Government

As the internet has spread in size and scope, its applications have included the interactions between many governments and their citizens. In addition to the growth of personal and commercial uses of the internet, electronic government, or e-government, expanded in tandem throughout the world. User-friendly graphical interfaces expedited this process enormously and opened the possibility of two-way flows of digital information between citizens and their states (and more recently, have paved the way for mobile governance, or m-government). There are many definitions of e-government (Yildiz 2007), but all essentially point to the use of information technologies (typically the internet) to facilitate the delivery of government information and services, restructure administrative procedures, and enhance citizen participation. Not surprisingly, the topic has drawn considerable scholarly.

Mergers and Acquisitions in the Telecommunications Industry

The 1990s witnessed an enormous wave of mergers and acquisitions dramatically reconfigure the market structure of global telecommunications. In Europe and the U.S., telecommunications firms have steadily consolidated into a shrinking pool of providers, rapidly oligopolizing the industry. This paper reviews the number and size of mergers and acquisitions globally in the 1990s and charts the national patterns of purchasers and target firms, noting the overwhelming hegemony of American corporations. The reasons behind this process include globalization, deregulation, the convergence of digital technologies, the search for economies of scale and scope, and U.S. corporate tax laws. It also points to the impacts of this oligopolization on consumer prices, labor, equity of access to telecommunications services, and the political and cultural repercussions of increasingly concentrated ownership.

Eruvim: Talmudic places in a postmodern world

Lodged in the heart of Western urban space, eruvim are religious enclaves important to Orthodox Jewish culture. Eruvim enable acceptable behaviours on the Sabbath as defined by Talmudic theological dogma. Work, and the carrying of all objects associated with work, is prohibited in public spaces on the Sabbath by the Talmud, yet within the boundaries of the eruv, many such restrictions are relaxed, facilitating social interaction and community cohesion. This paper examines the religious and spatial dimensions of eruvim, including the obsessive detail paid to the demarcation of their boundaries, which serve as metaphorical walls and doorways. It also explicates the local politics through which private space is effectively extended into public space. Conceptually, the paper situates the topic within broader concerns about diasporic Jewish identity, which is threatened by assimilationism, slow demographic growth and secularization. It invokes recent theories concerning the spatialization of consciousness and subjectivity, noting the recent growth of eruvim as part of the global surge in ethnic identity that has emerged as a backlash to postmodern capitalism.

Racialized Topographies: Altitude and Race in Southern Cities

This study examines altitudinal residential segregation by race in 146 cities in the U.S. South. It begins by embedding the topic in recent theorizations of the social construction of nature, the geography of race, and environmental justice. Second, it focuses on how housing markets, particularly in the South, tend to segregate minorities in low‐lying, flood‐prone, and amenity‐poor segments of urban areas. It tests empirically the hypothesis that blacks are disproportionately concentrated in lower‐altitude areas using gis to correlate race and elevation by digital elevation‐model block group within each city in 1990 and 2000. The statistical results confirm the suspected trend. A map of coefficients indicates strong positive associations in cities in the interior South‐where the hypothesis is confirmed‐and an inverse relationship near the coast, where whites dominate higher‐valued coastal properties. Selected city case studies demonstrate these relationships connecting the broad dynamics of racial segregation to the particularities of individual places.

Global geographies of the Internet

1: Introduction.- 2: Origins, Growth, and Geographies of the Global Internet.- 3: Global Internet Censorship.- 4: Global E-Commerce.- 5: Global E-Government.- 6: Social Media.- 7: References

The geopolitics/geoeconomics of military base closures in the USA

Abstract Contrary to assertions equating the post-Keynesian state with a militarized economy, the closure of US military facilities in the 1990s reveals a fluid, highly contingent politic dynamic that profoundly affects the landscape of military expenditures. This paper opens with a refutation of interpretations that equate post-Keynesianism with militarism. Next, it examines the geopolitics surrounding closures of military facilities, including Pentagon motivations and the sources of local opposition. Third, it turns to the geoeconomics of base closures: using input-output analysis, it estimates the total impacts by state attributable to the 1988, 1991 and 1993 waves of closures. Finally, it points to the fruits of alternative uses of such sing military conversion.

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Cleveland

Cleveland, Ohio, long the quintessential blue-collar, working-class American city, has been fashioned through a series of periodic transformations tightly linked to the changing rhythms of the national and global economies. After a brief review of the citys historical development, this article explores Clevelands descent in the face of massive and traumatic deindustrialization. In the 1990s, as the midwestern economy has become thoroughly restructured around the prerequisites of post-Fordism, Cleveland has enjoyed an unexpected renaissance, including an incipient high-technology sector, producer services, and as a center of cultural consumption. A consistent theme throughout is that the details of Clevelands experience can be understood only in reference to the citys changing competitive position; in this light, it offers a lens through which national and global tendencies conjoin in unique local contexts.