Information, Place, and Cyberspace

This chapter provides a broad overview of alternate ways for seeing the operative linkages between human experiences on the ground (in place) and user experi ences in cyberspace. Information is treated as the resource that binds these realms into functional human systems, while computer, telecommunication, and transpor tation technologies are viewed as tools of accessibility that are allocated differen tially among people, institutions, and regions. Two general propositions guide the discussion. First, there are significant structural linkages among information re sources, traditional places, and cyberspace; and second, grasping these linkages requires expanded models of space (and time) that encompass both the physical and virtual worlds.

The study of accessibility in geography and related disciplines has a distinguished history dating back to Ravenstein’s work over a century ago. In the late 1940s to the 1960s, scholars such as Zipf, Stewart, Warntz, and Wilson theorized about the way individuals and aggregates of individuals respond to the constraints of cost, time, and effort to access work, shopping, recreation, and other spatially distrib­uted opportunities. Since that time accessibility has been closely related to but also distinguished from such key geographic concepts as mobility, nearness, and the friction of distance. The models developed for its study belong for the most part in a large class of constructs known as spatial interaction models because they repre­sent the patterns and intensity of interactions among locations in geographic space. Different forms of spatial interaction models have been successfully used to study accessibility at the aggregate level, while the study of individual movements in space-time has provided insights into the significance of accessibility in people’s daily lives. One of the most robust findings of modern quantitative geography has been that interactions decline sharply with increasing distance, which is another way of saying that there is less and less contact between or among people or places as these become less and less accessible from one another.

Suburbanization, economic restructuring, globalization, and rapid developments in transportation and telecommunications technologies have had dramatic impacts on the urban landscape, fundamentally altering the spatial and organizational composition of where we work and where we live. How have these broad spatial processes impacted intra-metropolitan accessibility? How are these impacts expressed physically on the urban landscape? Who, in terms of both geographic location and socioeconomic groups, is affected? How? What are the implications for urban development and planning policy?

New telecommunications — digital information and communication technologies that support interaction and transaction over long distances — are emerging as a primary force in shaping cities. And more fundamentally, they are becoming one of the most important variables in defining spatial relationships among people and organizations located in metropolitan areas. Manifested by the rapid growth of the Internet, ATMs, and mobile phones, telecommunications are permeating the physical structure, the economic production, and the social life of cities. Visibly and invisibly, these technologies are creating new spatial paths and barriers that will profoundly affect people’s access to economic opportunities and social services. Therefore, one of the most important tasks for urban researchers in the information age is to help policy makers and the general public to understand, monitor, predict, and respond to spatial consequences resulting from a massive-scale deployment of new telecommunications.

This chapter is concerned with methodologies for determining accessibility at an individual and aggregate level, both from the perspective of what the individual can access and of the degree to which many individuals can access a location. Throughout this chapter, however, the authors view accessibility as a time-space phenomenon, both in terms of how accessibility should be conceived and of how it should be reported. In essence, we attempt to take the space-time view of Hägerstrand (1970; 1975) and build from it a framework for defining accessibility in an enhanced way, making that definition operational for large numbers of people and extracting new forms of expression and query from it along the way.

Accessibility is a measure of association linking people (or places) with some target destination or node. In its most general formulation, accessibility is not limited to a strictly geographic interpretation. Thus, instead of spatial proximity, accessibility may represent the ease with which one may gain entry to certain social or communications networks. The rapid advent of emerging information technologies increases the imperative task for geographers and other social scientists to develop models that are sufficiently robust to accommodate the concept of accessibility in its physical, social, and technological manifestations. To that end, this paper examines the potential to combine the fuzzy logic of Zadeh (1965) and Kosko (1992) with the club theory of Tiebout (1956) and Buchanan (1965) to model accessibility in both geographic and non-geographic contexts.

Issues related to the reconceptualization of access and accessibility in the information age have received significant attention from both policy makers and academic researchers in recent years (Couclelis 1996, Handy and Niemeier 1997, Kwan 1999, Litan and Niskanen 1998, Leebaert 1998, Miller 1999). This growing interest is attributed partly to the central importance of access and accessibility in geographic theories and models, and is caused partly by the extraordinary innovations in communication and transportation technologies in the late 20^th century (Hodge 1997, Hanson 1998). From recent literature, one concludes that there is little consensus on how to define (much less how to measure) access and accessibility in the information age. Most authors do seem to agree that the traditional conceptualizations of access and accessibility are incapable of capturing the new reality and that we need to redefine and reconceptualize accessibility in light of the new Internet-led revolution in telecommunications (See Chapter 16 by Hanson and Chapter 17 by Occelli). However, few have asked the fundamental questions: why are we so obsessed with the access and accessibility issues, and what exactly are their roles in our social and economic lives? If the dazzling development in telecommunications has rendered the definition of access and accessibility so elusive that they defy conventional measurements, what kind of alternative questions can we ask to better understand the E-merging geography of the information society?

The strongest convention in contemporary geographic thought is the notion that geographic space is rooted in a Euclidean geometry that defines the physical world. Although geographers have long sought to escape this paradigm through a rich array of perceptions based on ways in which we might imagine space, physical distance or its economic surrogates still provide the basic logic used by geographers to order their world and to make sense of the way activities locate in time and space. There is however a sea change in the making. As the world moves from one organized around energy to one based on information, the role of physical distance is changing as it is complemented by near instantaneous transactions that dramatically distort the effect of distance, thus changing the traditional bonds that have led to the current geographical organization of cities, regions, and nation states (Cairncross 1997).

A petroleum executive sitting at her desk in Houston knows when a satellite phone call might find her chief geologist hard at work in Uzbekistan, but this is nothing new. Since the end of the World War II, many a British veteran has maintained scheduled weekly contact with ham radio comrades half-a-day away in Australasia. And long before the Tokyo Stock Exchange operated on a 24-hour cycle, brokers in New York City knew when to reach colleagues at the office in Japan; if they weren’t certain, all they had to do was glance up at one of the half dozen or so clocks mounted on the wall. Even new initiates to the World Wide Web learn quickly that file transfers can be expedited by downloading from sites in countries where most of the population lies dormant. Computer-mediated communication across time zones surely must reach its zenith in emergency tele-medicine: interactive specialists in Toronto, Paris, and Auckland confer while viewing digital injuries sent from backpack transmitters by doctors on the ground in war-torn Bosnia. Fine and well, but when might a Japanese child log on in the classroom to chat with a virtual pen-pal in Canada? Chances are, never. Even in the near future of affordable webcams, speech recognition, and simultaneous translation, it will be impossible for students in Halifax to converse with sister-city pupils in Hakodate. Why? When Japanese students start school at 9 o’clock in the morning, it is 10 o’clock at night on Canada’s east coast. Simply put, one city or the other is always going to be asleep.

Since 1993, when the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, was released into the public domain, the Internet has evolved from an obscure academic and military research network into an international agglomeration of public and private, local and global telecommunications systems. Much of the academic and popular literature has emphasized the distance-shrinking implications and placelessness inherent in these rapidly developing networks. However, the relationship between the physical and political geography of cities and regions and the virtual (or logical) geography of the Internet lacks a strong body of empirical evidence upon which to base such speculation.

One definition of the Internet is ‘... a collection of resources that can be reached from those networks’ (Krol and Hoffman 1993, 1). This definition provides the starting point for my conceptualization of accessibility in the Information Age. I will examine how one can begin to measure and visualize the aspects of accessibility to information resources within the Internet. My discussion starts with the assumption that a person has physical access to the Internet, via a networked computer¹. Once this ‘physical’ connectivity has been overcome, how accessible are the information resources, people, and electronic places available online? What are the future accessibility issues that need to be considered to realize the full potential of the Internet beyond basic connectivity? As the Microsoft mantra says, where do you want to go today?, so what resources are accessible within the Internet and how do you reach them? This is very much a concern with individual accessibility and with developing a behavioral geography for Cyberspace (Brunn 1998, Kwan 1998).

Internet related commerce (e-commerce) is going through a phase of rapid growth. The size of this business sector will undoubtedly have effects on the economies of many nations, particularly those, which rely heavily on ‘invisible earnings’ from the quaternary business sector. However, as yet, the scale of these effects cannot be predicted since there has been very little in the way of quantitative analysis of Internet information flows. It is not even possible to answer basic questions about the Internet, such as how many users there are or where they are located. In the absence of hard information and useful models, reliance is often placed on the predictions of Internet ‘gurus’ whose estimates often vary considerably.

Geographical understanding of accessibility usually proceeds macroscopically, from the vantage point of a remote and detached observer. Total minutes of telephone communication between a set of countries, presented as a network map, would be one form such knowledge might take. Frequency of flights between a set of cities would be another. While the macroscopic perspective provides a good sense of the overall degree of interaction between places and how such interaction varies spatially, it can obscure the way communication and transportation are incorporated in individual lives in real places, and hide much that is of interest from a cultural, social, or psychological viewpoint. This is perhaps even more true in the information age than in previous ages.

The preeminence of information as the foundation for the economies of most countries is often attributed to the technical possibilities available through computers and telecommunications. The information age is often presented as a product of the marriage of technologies and the triumph of advances in electronics and engineering. Increasingly apparent, however, is the need to incorporate social elements into our understanding of information technologies and the information age. By addressing the social context for these new technologies, discussion moves from the realm of what is technically feasible, to issues of access, equity, community, and identity. The theme of Part III is how to revisit the well developed theoretical foundation established for accessibility in transportation research, and to advance this foundation to understand the social impact of electronic media, such as computers, the Internet, and Geographic Information Systems.

A major proposition prevalent in the geographic information research community is that better models, tools and techniques are needed to measure and represent changes in access as more and more of the interactions and transactions of our daily lives occur electronically. Measures or representations from these tools and techniques will purportedly help us identify the winners and losers in society as we move to electronic social interaction environments. However, the losers quite often are obvious and a focus on measuring losses in such situations seems misplaced when energies might be better spent on lessening or reversing such losses. Further, measurement tools are often used by those in power positions in attempts to refute that losses are actually occurring. This is because many of the benefits of access and costs of lack of access (such as missed opportunities) are very difficult to measure or otherwise quantify in a convincing manner. In addition, by focusing on the scientific reliability of tools and measurements, those in power positions often are able to divert attention and energy away from the goals of opponents that otherwise would undermine their control over access.

As Michael Goodchild reminds us¹, the Seventeenth-Century geographer, Bernard Varenius, produced a treatise focused on two views of geography. One, clearly related to the work of Newton, covered general geography (dealing with a general set of principles) and the other dealt with ideographic geography (having to do with the special character of places). Varenius’ (1650) two-fold approach affirms what our society has forgotten, but what is in agreement with Newton himself: we need to conceive of — there is — both absolute and relative space. The former is assumed by physicists in the course of their abstractions and the latter is experienced by ordinary people in the course of making their way in the world. However, today, the powerful realm of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), for all its potential for human understanding and good, does substantial violence by requiring that all our transactions and uses translate (radically convert) our experiential realms into the coded terms of GIS as based on data provided and available only in Euclidean geometrical terms for Newtonian space.

Accessibility is the geographic definition of opportunity. The opportunity individuals have to participate in necessary or desired activities, or to explore new ones, is contingent upon their ability to reach the right places at the appropriate times and with reasonable expenditure of resources and effort. Up until recently the history of the increase in accessibility at local, regional, and global scales has largely been the history of improvements in transportation. With the advent, spread, and now merging of telecommunications and digital information technologies there exist for the first time viable and often preferable alternatives to physical movement for accessing and engaging in economic, social, or cultural activities. These developments combine with advances in the design and management of physical transportation to create substantially altered forms of accessibility landscapes reflecting profound changes in the meaning of that term itself and its implications for urban and regional structure and function.