The Standard Location, Location, Location
"Six weeks ago in this space, I asked for the best proof of something that "everyone knows" will be true of the Internet Age but that somehow hasn't come true yet. That is the idea that as communications becomes better, faster and cheaper, physical location will matter less and less."

"Contestant Ed Rigdon wrote, "I think the hypothesis is false. Like the early e-tail idea of stores without inventory that still deliver great service at low prices, this 'irrelevance of location' idea ignores the critical role of social context in giving value to information and in facilitating cooperation and risk-taking. ... I know people who work remotely, but they will remain the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, these people pay a substantial price, in terms of what they are missing, in order to gain the benefits of their remote location."

redux [10.07.00]
Internet Geography Project: Putting place back in cyberspace Overview
"This project arose in response to one of the great myths or the Internet age, i.e. the coming of cyberspace heralds the end physical constraints which will eventually lead to the death of cities. In fact, the exact opposite is occurring. The largest concentrations of Internet users and producers are located in urban areas and many of the most innovative firms in the Internet space are housed in downtowns. There should be nothing surprising about this since, cities have always been the primary source of innovation and will continue to play this role in the future.

Although the power of the Internet does opens up new possibilities for long-range collaboration and even new spaces of interaction within cyberspace it also exhibits much of the traditional unevenness that has characterized urban and economic development throughout history. The fact that information can be easily and widely distributed is often mistaken for an indication that the production of this information is also diffused. In fact, there is a much more complicated dynamic involving the connection of specific places to global networks resulting in a system of production that is both place-rooted and networked at the same time.

One of the greatest challenges facing any research project involving the Internet is finding reliable and practical indicators to support ones theories. In particular, assigning geographical locations to what takes place on the "spaceless" Internet is especially difficult. With this specific problem in mind, the Domain Name research project is an attempt to map the physical geography of one indicator of the Internet, i.e. domain names such as nokia.fi or nytimes.com."

The Standard Invisible Cities
"Cities have no place in the new economy – at least, that is, according to the literature of the new economy. Alvin Toffler coined the term "electronic cottage" in the '70s to describe the successor to centralized urban structure, and in the '80s John Naisbitt cheerily waved good-bye to the "abandoned cities" of industrial America. A chorus arose in the '90s to agree: Nicholas Negroponte said that high tech "will remove the limitations of geography," George Gilder called cities "leftover baggage from the industrial era" and William Knoke described our "age of Everything-Everywhere" as a "placeless society" in a "spaceless world."

Meanwhile, reality is headed in a different direction. If you want a good job as a programmer, new-media player or biotech researcher, you have a choice of living in perhaps a dozen big cities. Moreover, the most innovative firms tend to locate in highly concentrated urban districts such as Cambridge, Mass., Manhattan's Silicon Alley or the Loop in Chicago. Yet the techie prophets' forecasts of urban decline remain pervasive; there is a disconnect between reality and the popular folklore."

redux [10.09.00]
First Monday The Social Life of Information
"For years pundits have predicted that information technology will obliterate the need for everything from travel to supermarkets to business organizations to social life itself. They have heralded the coming of the virtual office, digital butlers, electronic libraries, and virtual universities. Beaten down by info-glut and exasperated by computer systems with software crashes, viruses, and unintelligible error messages, individual users tend to wax less enthusiastic about technological predictions. Amid the hype and the never-narrowing gap between promise and performance, they find it hard to get a vision of the true potential of the digital revolution.

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid in their book The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000) help us see through frenetic visions of the future to the real forces for change in society. Arguing elegantly for the important role that human sociability plays in the world of bits, this book, and the chapters published here in First Monday, gives us an optimistic look beyond the simplicities of information and individuals. The authors show how a better understanding of the contribution that communities, organizations, and institutions make to learning, knowledge, and judgement can lead to the richest possible use of technology in our work and everyday lives."