General Questions

1. What did you find most interesting about the article?
2. What questions about the article and the topics discussed do you have?
3. What generalizations can you come up with about the geography of cyberspace after reading the article?

Specific Questions

4. Where does the style of the article come from? Why does he use this style?
5. What is a "hacker tourist" and what attitudes, values, and interests informs the tastes and interests of a hacker tourist? To what extent is "hacker tourist" another term for geographer?
6. Why is it that the crossroads in Alexandria has lasted for so long? What makes some features of the landscape more permanent than others? What kinds of communication infrastructure/media last and what kinds do not?
7. How was the invention and development of undersea cables linked to the maintenance of empire? To what extent is it still liked to "empire" and if it is what sort of empire is it?
8. How is the "motherboard" of undersea cables unevenly developed? What is the cause of this uneven development and what are the consequences?
9. Is Stephenson correct when he says that there have been new technologies but no new ideas?
10. Stephenson writes that either we move to information or information moves to us. What effect does the increasing mobility of information have on societies? What does it enable us to do that we could not do when we had to move to the information?
11. How do undersea cables "warp" cyberspace and change the "geometry" of the world? Doreen Massey talks about a "power geometry." How does this changed geometry affect relations of power across space?
12. What role are information technologies playing in Malaysia's development strategies?
13. What do you think of Stephenson's metaphor of the Earth's Crust as a computer? If the Earth is a computer, what is it computing?
14. At the end of the article Stephenson writes that technological development of telecommunications is bound to progress but that, "The one challenge that will then stand in the way of The Computer will be the cultural barriers that have always hindered cooperation between different peoples." What does this article say about the relationship between society and technology? To what extent can technology be used to help solve social problems? To what extent does technological development help to create social problems?
15. What kind of geography is this article? To what extent is it a regional geography? If it is a regional geography what kind of region is being explored?