General Questions

What is geography?

What is cyberspace? How is it geographical?

Dodge and Kitchen

Short history of the Internet

• Do you have questions? What technical terms did you not understand?
• What did you find interesting about the history? What do you make of the claim that cyberspace is very old, evolutionary rather than revolutionary?
• A common argument is that geography does not matter in an age of cyberspace? To what extent is this true? To what extent does geography matter even more?
• All of the authors talk about the materiality of cyberspace? To what extent and how is cyberspace connected or tied to "meat space"?
• To what extent does cyberspace mirror rather than transcend unevenly developed geographical space?
  

Dualisms

• Place/placeless-questions on pg 16 Does cyberspace and info society create inauthentic places in geographical space? Does it provide alternative online authentic places for interaction based around interests rather than geographic location?
• How does cyberspace blur the separation between public/private?
• How does cyberspace challenge modernist structures of communication? (What are modernist structures of communication anyway?)
• How does cyberspace blur the distinction between the real and the virtual? What are simulacra? What does mimetic mean?
• How does cyberspace blur the distinction between nature and culture?
• How does the disembodied nature of cyberspace allow people to play with their identity? To what extent is cyberspace really disembodied?

Space

• What is the relational view of space and how is it different than absolute and essentialist notions of space?
• What are the implications of the argument that space in cyberspace is purely relational? (pg. 30).

Campanella Web cams

• What is new and interesting about web cams? How do they give geographical places new meaning?
• What are the implications of improvements in Telepresence and VR for our daily lives and our geographies?
• The Mars Rovers may be some of the best examples of telepresence yet developed.

Graham

• How does cyberspace help to restructure the city?
• What creates the situation where communications infrastructure is concentrated in large cities, but even within those cities there are electronic ghettos?