ABSTRACT
Whether framed through the more generalised notion of cyberspace, or the more specific phenomena of the Internet, the World Wide Web, Virtual Reality, hypertext and genres of science fiction such as cyberpunk, it is hard to miss the proliferating debates over the social and geographical significance of new technologies of computer mediated communication. For some, these technologies are seen as facilitating, if not producing, a qualitatively different human experience of dwelling in the world; new articulations of near and far, present and absent, body and technology, self and environment (for a collection of essays mostly in this spirit see Featherstone and Burrows 1995). For others, emphasis is laid on the capacity of digitalisation to integrate previously separate operations such as computation, communication and surveillance, with the consequent emergence of new informational networks and ‘spaces of flows’, with associated morphologies of connection and disconnection (see Castells 1996). In either case, what is at stake is, at its starkest, the suggestion that computer mediated communication technologies are ‘generating an entirely new dimension to geography… Virtual Geography’ (Batty 1997b:339).
