The Death Of Geography Is Greatly Exaggerated
from the location-location-location dept
One of the most common themes of writing about the Internet is that it's going to make geography irrelevant. There's clearly something to this. I'm writing this post in St. Louis, and before it goes live it will be looked over by Mike, who's normally in the Bay Area but is in Scotland this week. Still, Tim Harford has an interesting essay arguing that the Internet can also make geography more important by increasing the value of living in a high-density area. He gives online dating as an example: in the old days, a single guy living in New York might have several million single women to choose from, but with no way to quickly sift through all those options, the New York dating scene wouldn't be noticeably better than other cities. But now, with online dating, people have much more sophisticated tools to sift through the options and find someone who perfectly matches their interests, age, religious and political beliefs, etc, before they ever meet. I've personally noticed the high cost of not living in a major city. I've met a number of people online through a shared interest in technology policy, and almost all of them live in the DC, San Francisco, or New York metropolitan areas. So while the Internet has made it possible for me to write from anywhere, it's also made me more acutely aware of what I'm missing by not living in a larger metro area.
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Some times the smart people live in small places...
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Geography
http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2006/05/311c5c45-3f86-4c3d-aca4-c2e7e8544da0.html
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You are right...
Internet has given me a possibility to be able to write from news of all over the world, but... it has also shown me that am not on the right location to be -blogging- (because Buenos Aires, for example, is where the things happen).
Greetings,
Federico Almada
ps: Sorry for my english, my native language is spanish...
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Works the other way too
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Re: Works the other way too
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I spent a lot of time naming those places, the least you could do is remember where they are.
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So what is it that you're missing?
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Re: So what is it that you're missing?
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That being said, the NYC dating scene isn't all that great. There might be millions of people here, but they don't want to talk to you. Me, yes, you no (just joking, maybe)
Don't forget about the bias folks can get when they live in these areas. They believe they are smarter, work harder and are generally better than everyone else. If you can make it in NYC, you can make it anywhere, right? It isn't true or right, but there is that attitude. I have lived in NYC, DC, LA and the midwest. People are pretty much the same everywhere.
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Actually - in many ways, it does the opposite for me. After dealing with a large amount if idiots on the web, it makes me want to move even further from population heavy areas, hehe.
If I could work from hom even more, I'd be glad to move out even further.
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Statistics
I would also guess that the people that live in metro areas spend more time on-line because they don't have the beautiful outdoors as readily available. Just guessing though.
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A profound misunderstanding
People have been calling for the "death" of geography for over thirty years now, but here we are, still chugging along.
I actually think that geographic ties are becoming more profound with the increased use of the intertrons.
Just in my own research, people from culturally different geographic areas will interact with web sites in differing ways (thanks analytics!) - this is outside of language differences that may exist.
Virtual space is used and conceptualized in different ways by geographically disparate populations.
Then of course, there's the wonderful world of IP. Look at the Oink bust - servers in one country, admin in another, laws of a third.
The internet represents the "destruction of time and space," much more so than say the railroads did.
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new business model
You need to think of "new business models" for navigating that difference; that's all.
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isn't it ironic, doncha think?
Anyone else see the irony in this statement? :-)
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Next to my printer is an old morse code equipment that my grandfather used in the 1930s. It sits on a shelf under my DSL and wifi routers.
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Thanks For Clarifying
Thanks for what?
Thanks for clarifying:
"Sorry for my english, my native language is spanish..."
...because otherwise we would have had no clues to figure that out.
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