Mapping the invisible
April 2007
An interview with Martin Dodge, Lecturer in Human Geography, Manchester University
Kim Thomas
You might think that a geographer wouldn’t be able to tell us very much about the internet, but you’d be wrong. Geography isn’t just about rivers, mountains and valleys – it’s about social structures and their relationship with physical spaces. Martin Dodge, a lecturer in human geography at Manchester University, has looked at spatial relationships that many of us take for granted, namely those underpinning the internet.
Martin uses the term ‘cybergeography’ to describe the work he has done exploring and mapping the internet. He became interested in the idea that the tools of geography could be used to understand the internet in the early and mid-1990s. When he created his first website in the 1990s, and saw the hits on it, he started wondering where the users were coming from, and how they got to his website. “People don’t want to worry about where the Google server is, and how they are physically connected, so I think that understanding that is important. And one of the best ways into that is geographically plotting where the hardware is, where the users are, where the wires are.”
Frances Cairncross’s influential book ‘The Death of Distance’ was published in 1997, lending support to the prevalent idea that the internet would abolish the importance of geography: “It didn’t matter, as long as you had an IP address and a connection, where you were or where the information was. I was intrigued – I didn’t think that was true. I thought and still think there’s a physical underpinning to it. The more you look, the more it’s important to understand that infrastructure. The problem is that the infrastructure is always trying to be invisible.”
His aim, he says, was to make that invisible infrastructure visible. Cybergeography, as he defined it, had three elements: physical infrastructure; information; and people and the social spaces they used.
Understanding the infrastructure entailed finding out where servers and networks were physically located. He didn’t know what information was available until he started digging, and some of it is unavailable to the public for security reasons. From the information he was able to find, Martin created maps and diagrams that revealed previously hidden relationships: “Some of it is quite prosaic, but some of these maps are still quite revealing about the uneven geography of the internet, that the internet isn’t everywhere. One of the best maps of the modern world is the undersea cable map, which completely reveals the contemporary economics and political power in the world, just from where the cables go and where they don’t go.”
Martin also looked at the informational relationships on the internet (the way websites are linked to each other) and at the social interactions between people using e-mail, bulletin boards and discussion groups. He then converted these into maps to demonstrate the relationships visually: “In terms of mapping the social spaces, and the interactions of people, each person or topic becomes a node, and you want to know how they’re connected to each other and to ongoing conversations. If you had a mailing list that had 10 or 20 people posting hundreds of messages a month, your eventual interface to that is a linear list and you read each posting. The idea of being able to map that would be to step back from it and see the structure of that kind of conversation. It’s a bird’s-eye view of a party, so you can see who’s in the party, who’s in the cliques, who’s the noisy person dominating the conversation, who are the people lurking and not really saying much in the conversation and who are the people chipping in.”
This work on mapping cyberspace culminated in two books, co-authored with Rob Kitchin, called ‘Mapping Cyberspace’ and ‘Atlas of Cyberspace’. ‘Mapping Cyberspace’ discusses the principles and ideas of cybergeography, while ‘Atlas of Cyberspace’ contains hundreds of maps, often created by other people, that visually demonstrate internet relationships. They include, for example, maps of the differing numbers of internet connections in different countries, real-time traffic flows and network performance for particular networks, and the patterns of user browsing.
Martin believes his work on cybergeography has helped to expose the hidden inequalities that are part of the internet: “These digital divides are still there and on multiple scales. There’s a notion that the internet flattens hierarchy and that it’s a universal service. When you plot this kind of stuff you can still see the unequalness at different scales. A lot of people have written about this, but being able to visualise it still brings it home.”
His more recent work also looks at hidden inequalities, in the area of ‘
As an example, Martin cites the increasing prevalence of surveillance systems. One insurance company offers car insurance based on tracking, via a
As with the internet, he argues, new technologies are frequently presented as neutral or benign. His aim is to draw out the hidden political or social agenda: “It’s often presented as being almost natural, but like any technology it’s the way it’s been programmed that’s important, and quite often that benefits one particular group of people or one particular corporation at the expense of other groups, but quite often that inequality is deliberately opaque.”