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| TECHNOLOGY, INDUSTRY AND PLACE: THE ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY OF INTERNET |
| WANG Ming-feng |
| The Center for Modern Chinese City Studies, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China |
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Abstract The spatial diffusion of Internet technology remains starkly uneven at all scales.Geography matters online activities,after all,have certainly not been killed by the Internet.In fact,the two seem to be getting along rather well.In recent years,the academic research on Internet has been becoming popular in many fields such as economic geography.
In fact,a new sub-discipline of geography that focuses on the study of virtual spaces of the digital world, or cyber-geography,is exploding on numerous fronts.There are three broad,dominating perspectives identified by geographers.They are the ‘substitution and transcendence’ perspective,the ‘co-evolution’ perspective and the ‘recombination’ perspective.Furthermore,the economic geography of Internet encompasses a wide range of geographical phenomena.There are four aspects highlighted in this paper, including:1) the structure and location patterns of network physical infrastructure;2) digital divide and its spatial impact on global society;3) the distribution and structure of the supply and demand of Internet content industries,and 4) the organizational and spatial strategies for e-commerce and the interaction between electronic space and local economic space.
Based on the above reviews,this paper discusses the dialectical relationship between geographic and virtual space.The geographical difference of Internet activities is an historic dependency on ‘real’ places. Thus,real and virtual places are increasingly interdependent.Finally,some suggestions on further research are given.
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Received: 20 April 2004
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2005, Vol. 20 
