Introduction

Abstract

In December, 2011, more than 2.25 billion people used the internet, making it a tool of communications, entertainment, and other applications accessed by roughly 32 % of the world’s population (www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm). For most users these uses extend well beyond email, the most common internet use, to include: bill payments and electronic banking; job and housing searches; stock trading; “e-tail” shopping; searching for health information and news; online classes; digital gambling; online videogames; Voice Over Internet Protocol telephony; hotel and airline reservations; chat rooms; electronic tax payments; downloading television programs, movies, digital music, and pornography; and popular sites and services such as YouTube, Facebook, and Google. In all these ways, and more, cyberspace offers profound real and potential effects on social relations, everyday life, culture, politics, and other social activities. Indeed, for rapidly rising numbers of people around the world, the “real” and the virtual have become thoroughly interpenetrated. In this light, access to cyberspace is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. As its applications have multiplied, the internet is having enormous impacts across the globe, including interpersonal interactions and everyday life, identity formation, retail trade and commerce, governance, and is affecting the structure and form of cities, in the process generating round upon round of non-Euclidean geometries in the context of a massive global wave of time–space compression.