1. Mapping Cybergeographies
Stephen Graham
Newcastle University

2. The Myth of the
“End of Geography”
• 60s-90s: Pervasive rhetoric of “death of distance”,
“end of geography”, “end of cities”
• Apparently limitless and infinite mobilities
• Bill Gates “Friction-free capitalism”
• Virilio “Urbanization of real time”
• Substitutionist and deterministic assumptions:
“anything-anywhere-anytime dream”
• Dematerialisation, withdrawal from physical world:
body-city-geography

3. • And yet a new age of cartography
is emerging centred on revealing
the lie to these myths:
• 1. Visualizations of Cyberspace
• 2. Visualizing Cyberspace
Topologies and Flows
• 3. Visualizing Cyberspace
Materialities
• 4. Mapping Uneven Geographies
• 5. A Geolocated World:
Animating Geographies Through
GPS/Mobile/Satellites/Ubiquitous
Computing
• Highly charged politics of
mapping cybergeographies

4. 1. Visualizations of Cyberspace
• Cartographic techniques which help make
informational domains legible, navigable,
memorable
• Widespread use of geographical and urban
metaphors
• Increasing blurring of cyberspace/real space
boundary

5. Classic ‘Virtual Reality’ Paradigm:
Immersive, 3D: Marginalize the Body

6. Also Imaginary Geographies of Virtual Worlds

7. Alphaworld Virtual ‘City’

8. SimCity

9. Video Game Urban Simulations

10. Using Familiar Urban Cartography to
Structure Online Content

11. Geographical Metaphors to Structure
Complex Online Content

12. Amsterdam ‘Digital City’

14. Sometimes
utilise
national maps

15. 2. Visualizing Cyberspace
Topologies and Flows
• Capture the connectivities of ICT systems and
how the topological connections and flows of
data are constructed to benefit certain interests
and/or geographical areas
• Exposes extraordinarily stark and uneven
geographies and hidden biases of connectivity

16. Online position: informational space

17. Topological
Map of the Internet

19. Alt.discussion
groups

20. Hierarchical mapping

21. The UK JANET
Academic
Backbone

23. Mapping 24hr
Global Flows

24. Trace Routing

25. 3. Visualizing Cyberspace Materialities
• Material infrastructures supporting ‘cyberspace’
generally neglected or ignored (until they fail)
• Physical and cultural invisibility
• And yet they have highly uneven and important
geographies at all spatial scales: global to the urban
• E.g. Manhattan has more optic fibre than Africa
• Such patterns do much to reveal political, economic and
cultural geographies of power

26. Evolution of
ARPANET

27. Transnational Optic Fibre Networks

28. Triumvirate of Dominant Capitalist Heartland Regions: N
Am, Eur, E Asia

29. New Fibre Corridors and E-Peripheries

31. International
Phone Traffic
and
Bypassed
Zones

32. Satellite
‘Footprints’

33. Highly Uneven Urban and Regional ‘Dot.Com
Geographies’: UK ‘Spikes’

34. Matt Zook’s US ‘Dot.Com’ Map

35. Zook’s
Bay Area

36. Down Town
San Francisco

37. Dodge’s IP Address Density Surface
in London

38. WiFi ‘Hot Spots’

39. Revealing Fibre for Local Economic
Promotion e.g. San Diego

40. Digitised Urban Simulacra

41. Virtual Los Angeles

42. Webcams: Cyberspace as Prosthetic Eyes

43. 4. Mapping Uneven Geographies
• Mapping cybergeographies can act as proxies to
reveal and visualise uneven development,
divisions of labour, and geographies of social
polarisation at all geographical scales: From
technogeopolitics to urban social geographies
• An Examples: Technogeopolitics-- Global N-S
relations

44. Technogeopolitics: Contrasts Global Population
Density and Internet Router Density

45. Main Concentrations of Domain Names

46. Postcolonial Techno Geopolitics of Connectivity

47. Cartograms to Demonstrate Who Dominates Web Growth:
2007

48. 2015 (projected)

49. 5. Geolocated
Worlds: Animating
Geographies
Through GPS/
Mobile/
Ubiquitous
Computing
• Eg Amsterdam
Realtime project
2002
•
Seehttp://
www.interactivearchitecture.org/
amsterdam-realtime-waagsociety.html

50. Google Earth/Google Maps: Covergence of Geolocation/ Remote
Sensing/ Virtual reality/ Photography/Navigation

51. Produces Active Mash-Ups as “New Spatial Media”

52. These Co-exist With Growing Sophistication and
Commercialisation of Parallel, Online Worlds

54. Conclusions
• New age of cartography revealing the lie of cyberutopian
or dystopian rhetoric of the death of geography or distance
through real-time
• Shift from geographical metaphors to help make
cyberspace navigable, to sophisticated mapping of the
geographical bases and materialities that sustain
‘cyberspace’
• Blurring real/virtual boundaries
• As with all cartography, these representations biased and
politicised, but very revealing
• Shit towards dynamic, animated, cartographies generated
by everyday mobilities